Investment in content marketing is predicted to increase over the next year, this includes the use of newsletters, and there are several reasons for this.

1. It is effective.

Talking to a potential customer from their inbox is incredibly powerful and they are likely to visit their inbox more times in a day than any other ‘social’ space.

2. Builds relationships and trust

Providing useful content helps build a relationship with your potential customers and this is a great way to build trust. People buy things from people they trust.

3. Gives a measurable return on investment.

Although there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to tracking user behaviour on the web, there are a lot of tools and strategies that can help you pinpoint areas that may be losing you customers on their journey to your sales point. Thankfully we have come along way from John Wannamaker’s day when he said of traditional advertising, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

If you can think of any information that may be of use to your potential customers, maybe from questions you continually get asked or by having spotted an upcoming trend in your industry, you are well on your way to becoming a content marketer. The first step is to find your platform.

Why we use MailChimp

It’s Free!

As long as you have less than 2,000 email addresses on your lists and send no more than 12,000 emails a month then MailChimp is free. The more advanced features such as auto-responders require a monthly fee but you may not need these starting out.

User friendly

Although there are advantages to knowing a little HTML when designing your email templates, MailChimp gives you a great template builder. Importing contacts and most other tasks are covered in the easy to follow instruction manuals.

Great Deliverability

In a world where more junk is sent than legitimate email messages, spam filters are continually getting tougher. It is a tricky task to get an email into the inbox of a potential customer and when you are sending the same newsletter to hundreds of email addresses, this task becomes even more fraught as spammers are doing the same thing. With the development of a system that respects the spam filters and actively weeds out spammers trying to use it for no good, MailChimp can proudly claim their inbox acceptance rates are between 96% to 99% – and that is about as good as it gets.

WordPress Integration

MailChimp and WordPress play well together and with a good plugin for your WordPress site, it is a relatively simple task to add a subscription box to your site.

There are several applications out there that offer similar functionality as MailChimp and some of these have a free account option, but for our money MailChimp offers an easy to understand interface with all the features you will need to start your journey as a content marketer.

Click to go to the MailChimp email marketing service.

If you want to start your journey with a conversion optimised campaign from the newsletter text, account setup, contact import, newsletter graphic design and training drop us a line

– and if you haven’t yet, subscribe to our newsletter below : )