One of my previous blog posts dealt with spicing up your bellydance newsletter. But for those of you that don’t use them or use them infrequently (like I do) I wanted to delve into the question of, do they work? Are bellydance newsletters worth doing? What do they actually do for your business, if anything?
Many entrepreneurs will say that email lists are everything and that you need to have a way to get your customers email addresses. That you should offer a freebie to get it and then add them to your list. And do some of the things I mentioned in my previous post to keep them. I have seen so many offerings for getting on someone’s newsletter list. But I haven’t seen the same studies and correlations for belly dancers. No one that I know has said, without my newsletter, my classes are empty. Or my performance schedule is empty. Also, I haven’t seen data on retention. Do people put in their email just to get the free thing and then unsubscribe? Is the email they are giving you the one that they get all their “junk” sent to?
In order to get a better idea of what the stats were, I polled my trusty social media following! Some use newsletters once to twice a month and get the best results in terms of a direct response for registration for their classes and workshops. Others use it once a month and it targets those who don’t use Facebook. The click-rate isn’t high but it reaches those who might not find social media as all consuming as most. The general consensus is that they do have a response, even if it is minimal. It also seems like they are sent out monthly and not weekly. Usually for the start of a new class session, a workshop or a show.
It was nice to see that their experience is similar to my own. The newsletters do work. Perhaps not to the magnitude that we would like or to the scale of a social media promotion but they do have value. So make sure the next time you go to create that newsletter you remember that even the tiniest number of clicks can make a difference in your business!