Recently, one of our clients asked TDA to justify the costs of a customer newsletter we produce for them. It’s a modest publication that goes to a house list of people who have purchased a particular product line. The newsletter features stories about best practices, case studies, how-to articles about complex product uses and configurations, and interviews with product managers and architects, along with an occasional sneak-peek story about product features in development.
In short, the newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with a solid customer base. But recently a naysayer asked, “Why should we spend on a newsletter?” This person then went on to say, “We have good documentation on the Web site and we’ve already won these customers. Shouldn’t we redirect this budget to lead gen? We need more leads!”
We encounter this shortsighted mentality far too often. Custom content, in this case a newsletter, is the most cost-effective way a brand can deepen customer relationships. Newsletters, when done well, are read vociferously by customers. Think about it. Customers have an economic stake in your product. They are eager to wring as much value from your product as possible and hold a keen interest in its future. Hey, they have skin in the game.
It should go without saying, but let me say it: deeper customer relationships are tremendously valuable. And by reading a well-produced newsletter, better-informed customers can:
- Discover more reasons to upgrade or purchase more items in a product family.
- Self-identify for cross-sell opportunities.
- Shop the competition less, negotiate less aggressively, and become less price-sensitive.
- Impose fewer demands on your support team, helping you lower those costs.
- Actively participate more often in your brand’s communities and lend more support.
- Transform their view of you as a vendor or supplier, and see your company more as a partner.
- Mature from loyal customer into brand evangelist and become your advocate.
Cultivating these traits within a customer base can transform an entire marketplace. The economic value of such a transformation can be staggering.
Of course, the key to unlocking the full potential of any customer newsletter is quality execution. The newsletter must be timely, informative, and helpful to customers who receive it. If the newsletter starts to smell like schmaltzy PR—or worse, marketing fluff—it will quickly lose effectiveness, while readership dwindles and the brand becomes damaged.
That’s why brands have been turning to TDA for decades for these sorts of publications. We’ve mastered the art of producing enterprise content. Our team of writers and editors is constantly producing content that’s useful for readers and delivers a messaging payload for the brand.
Are your relationships with customers as great as they could be? If not, take a look at your existing forms of outreach to customers and ask yourself, “How does this serve my customers? How do they benefit from it? What will this enable that they otherwise would have struggled to achieve? What failures does this help them avoid?”
As always, let me know
