Attracting new home buyers to your website, holding their attention
long enough to browse it and finally getting them to fill out a form for more
information is the goal of every modular home factory.
When a form is filled out, that lead is distributed to the
builder closest to the prospective home buyer and everything works great. To
get people to your website many of you are using social media to drive them to
it. Again, this is great.
But there is another target market you’re probably not paying
enough attention to these days; your employees and builders.
In the good old days, prior to 2008, many factory owners had
assigned someone in the office to be the ‘official’ editor of a printed
newsletter that was sent out on either a quarterly or monthly basis. It
featured stories about what is happening in the factory, new products, builder’s
finished homes, a couple human interest stories and of course, birthdays.
I worked for a factory that sent these out quarterly and
when it hit the sales floor we were all glued to it. Loyalty was earned through
these newsletters. It was great to see something you might have been a part of
mentioned in it or better yet when your birthday was featured.
In our increasingly paperless world, disbursing information
is becoming both easier and more difficult at the same time. It’s easier because
everyone has email and designing an email newsletter and sending it out on a
regular basis can be automated. It’s harder because someone has to take the
time out of their schedule to gather information from multiple sources, create
the stories and have it ready to send out.
I can’t think of many factories that have a person with
enough time to do this challenging job. Someone may volunteer to do it for a
month or two but it soon becomes a chore trying to pry interesting stuff from
the cold, almost dead fingers of the people in your company.
When it comes down to
it, successful email newsletters are based on five basic principles:
- Create a practical
format
- Be interesting
- Be engaging
- Keep it simple
- Keep your deadlines!
Create a practical format
If you’re creating this newsletter for your own small
business, you already know that you’re a strong and ambitious person, but with
newsletters it’s probably a good idea to set the strong ambitions aside. Shoot
for a simple, easy-to-read, and engaging format that not only avoids
overwhelming your readers, it avoids overwhelming you on deadline day. Readers
today generally like their information in quick bites, and a newsletter with
between three and five stories is usually an achievable ñ and readable ñ
length.
The most important thing to remember, however, is to make
sure your newsletter is an achievable length both for you and your readers.
Be Interesting
What can you write about that will snag the attention of
your reader? Remember, you don’t have to stick to stories within your company
or even within modular housing industry.
Broaden your horizons by thinking outside of the box and
finding stories that pertain to your company but also engage your reader.
Another great benefit of these types of stories is that it might even encourage
your readers to re-post them, another plus in your marketing campaign.
Your builders and employees will actually begin to look
forward to them if you can keep it interesting.
Be Engaging
Interesting stories aside, you can quickly lose your
audience if your articles are written in a boring, choppy, or poorly written
manner. Additionally, if your articles are written with selling in mind, with
lots of loud marketing language, your newsletter is as good as deleted from
your builders’ and employee’s inbox.
Instead, write to engage, as though you’re having a
conversation with the reader. Include little tidbits about your business –
share some fun stories. If your company recently won an award, talk more about
the experience rather than bragging about the honor. For example, say the
company owner was on his way to the podium when his wife shouted “Way to go, John!”
You could say how it took him almost a minute to stop blushing and give his
acceptance speech.
No matter what, you want to make sure your point comes
across in a clear, concise, engaging, and conversational manner. Make them feel
like they’re a part of the family!
Keep it Simple
As a business person, this idiom is probably old hat for
you, but it never hurts to get a reminder: whatever you do, keep it simple.
Instead of making your readers slog through paragraphs of irrelevant and boring
information to get to the gist of your article, try serving it to them in
little bites of information. One good example comes from a local community
newspaper. There’s one page that lists a handful of numbers in bold, like
headlines, with a line of information beneath each. I remember those nuggets of
facts far more than the information in the lengthy surrounding articles.
For example, the numeric headline might read “43,211” and
the line of information beneath it states “The number of times the average
person has looked at his or her email since the beginning of the year.”
You can utilize this format in your own business by creating
interesting snippets of information that stick with your readers long after
they’ve forgotten the articles. Your interesting facts could be the number of
2x4’s the factory has used the past year, countdown to Deer Season for the PA
factories or the number of miles your homes are shipped each month. Whatever it
is, make sure you provide your readers with information that’s short, simple,
and to the point.
Keep your Deadlines
The author Douglas Adams once wrote, “I love deadlines. I
like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” That mentality might work
for authors, but not for modular home factory owners. If your employees and
builders are expecting to see a newsletter from you every Wednesday by noon,
make sure you’ve worked out your schedule so that will always be possible. Once
they lose faith in your ability to keep deadlines, they start to lose faith in
your company.
So the next time you’re working on your email newsletter, or
considering starting one for your business, consider these five basic
principles: Is it practical, interesting, engaging, and simple, and can you
keep your deadlines? If so, you’re sure to have a loyal and rapidly growing
readership in no time.
Writing a successful email newsletter for your employees and
builders can be one of the best secret weapons you could ever create to build
loyalty.
If you would like help in starting one but just know how to begin, need some
help putting it together or actually having someone from the Modular Home
Builder blog staff create and maintain it, contact MODCOACH today.
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