Staying in touch with your customer base can be a great way to increase customer loyalty, up-sell, extend their length of stay and encourage referrals. But we also all know the feeling of signing up to a newsletter somewhere and then being eternally spammed with one good offer after the other. So how do you get the balance right? These are the top 3 most important questions to ask yourself. 

How much am I selling?

If you want people to read your newsletter, it’s not enough to simply send them an attractive offer and hope for the best. Customers are inundated with marketing emails and if you want them to read yours, you need to offer value. A good rule of thumb is that one third of your email should be dedicated to selling and the other two thirds should be dedicated to adding value to your customers. So offer them advice on how to use the space in their storage unit efficiently, which packing materials are right for which items, or how they can get involved in the charity that you support. And then sell! 

How often do I get in touch?

The answer to this question lies in your product life cycle, and chances are the product life cycle will be different for different customer groups. If your private customers tend to have a shorter length of stay than your business customers, then it is a good idea to differentiate your newsletter frequency and content between these group; or other groups if you can segment even further. Put together a newsletter frequency that fits each group and tailor your message and offer to each of them. This may sound like a time consuming task, but with the right reports from your management system and good emailing software, it doesn’t need to take long. 

Customers who stay for a shorter period of time will benefit from hearing from you more often during their stay. Customers who stay longer may find it annoying if you contact them at the same frequency, and they may be interested in very different offers than your shorter staying customers. The more targeted and relevant you can make your newsletter, the higher response rates you’ll get. 

Do I stand out?

Once you have decided on the frequency, it will be time to prepare your design and content, and this is a topic that we’ll cover more in detail in later blogs. But a few points to keep in mind are:

• An attention grabbing headline: your newsletter needs to grab attention from the second it lands in your customer’s inbox, or else chances are they won’t even open it to read it. So spend some time crafting a really gripping headline that will catch your customers’ interest. 

• A call to action: it needs to be clear and easy to work out how to take you up on whatever offer you are including in your newsletter. Make it visible and clear what the customer has to do to take advantage of it. 

Final tip: put yourself at the top of the list

Before you send a newsletter to your customers, make sure you send it to yourself first. No matter how good your newsletter looks in the preview mode of your mailing application, it may end up looking differently when it arrives in an Outlook inbox, or on your phone. So make sure you have double checked the layout on different platforms before pushing the send button.