Make Your Newsletter a Friend: Getting Past the Pitchware

Do you know what it’s like when you meet someone and after a while, you ask yourself when that person is going to stop talking about themselves on and on? We’ve probably all had that experience. How likely would you want to hang out with a person if droning on and on about themselves was their norm? This is not a tough question, right? 

Here’s the deal – while few of us would intentionally behave that way when we meet people, we do it all the time with our newsletters. When you send a newsletter out and all it does is say, “Here’s what’s new with us,” as well as pitching things, it feels a lot like that self-obsessed person you met at the party.

So, how do you make your newsletter a lot more interesting for your audience to receive over the course of time? First, talk about the things your readers might be interested in, not just about what you’re doing. If you think your readers are involved in personal finance, learning to play the guitar, camping, or eating out, you could include some great content on those topics.

Your newsletter isn’t just about your brand and what you have to offer. It is about building a relationship and delivering value to your readers. If you consistently send out interesting and cool stuff to your audience, you’ll see better retention and referral growth. Better yet, the perception of your newsletter will go from being “pitchware,” to being helpful, interesting, and even entertaining.

This is a major shift. Most marketers want to use every opportunity they have to tell the other person about their company, their products, and their content. Getting past that and being willing to share content from other companies you think will help your readers can change the game. It also repositions your brand and your newsletter as a helpful resource that people want to receive.

But curating great content isn’t easy. It is quite challenging to do well and on a consistent basis. Furthermore, understanding the pulse of your audience and including the kind of content they will find enjoyable is tough without following the lowest common denominator approach. For example, what is interesting to your target audience?

Approaching newsletters this way doesn’t require any particular software tool. However, we created rasa.io to make this approach to newsletters super easy. Our platform helps you do all the things that make your newsletter better but in an automated way. For instance, rasa.io personalizes the content you send to every single reader. As you probably know, that is tough to do manually. The point of the platform we’ve built is to make newsletter curation super easy, and even fun. Plus, our platform is free for the vast majority of small business users out there.