What is a newsletter? You hear us all the time promoting our newsletter and getting people to sign up (which you should!). How is a newsletter different from following on social media? What's the difference? We will have all your newsletter questions answered today!
What is a newsletter?
A newsletter is usually a form of direct contact a business has with its customers. Usually, this is via email but sometimes it can be through text message. Newsletters can go out as frequently as once a day (or even twice a day) or as infrequently as once a month. For our newsletter, we constantly have new products coming in so we send ours out once a week on Tuesday morning. Right around 10:30 am. This works for us, but different businesses have different times and days of the week when they send theirs out. Newsletters are to inform customers of news about the business. New products coming in, events coming up, etc. While businesses also promote this on their social media, newsletters are a little different.
Newsletter vs Social Media
While newsletter information usually goes out to social media at some point, the difference is that newsletters will ALWAYS reach you. Newsletters go from our emailing platform direct to you. Unless the email got put in wrong or servers are down for your email provider, you will always receive our emails. They will always show up in your inbox. Social media, however, is a little different. Social media is never guaranteed to show you our content. That's where joining a newsletter is super important! Just because you follow us on social media doesn't mean you'll see everything we post. This is unfortunately something that none of us can dictate as that would be on the social media platform and what it decides to show you in your feed.
What are the benefits of joining?
There are lots of benefits to joining a newsletter! For us, when you sign up and give us your birthday details (we only need the month and date!), we send you a gift on your birthday! Our shop carries gift items and we know some of you hold back from buying what you like, so this is an opportunity to get what you want! You also stay informed about us as a business so if you like our shop, you should be on our newsletter list. We tell you all about new products coming in, we give you lots of information about the new product that sometimes doesn't make it into social media because we're limited to only a few seconds.
Our newsletter subscribers are our VIPs and we like to treat them as such. We do exclusive VIP events just for them! You only get an invite when you subscribe to our newsletter. We usually give about a 2-3 weeks' notice of when these events are happening. For us, you get a lot of benefits when you sign up for our newsletter!
Keep in mind, each business is different and the same benefits we give does not mean every business gives. While we do VIP events, some other businesses may not do that at all. So keep that in mind when you sign up for another newsletter.
Why do businesses encourage you to join their list?
If we're talking about us (Crafty Owl), we encourage people to join our list as a way of more direct communication with our followers than on social media. We realized more and more that social media isn't showing our content to all of our followers so we wanted to start that communication on our own and on our own terms. It also helps us streamline our content planning as we base our content based on our blog for the week and our newsletter of the week. We also wanted to do more adult events and to do that, they needed to be invite-only. Having our newsletter is the best way to do this as it is invite-only to our newsletter subscribers.
If we're talking in general, newsletters are the best way for businesses to have direct contact with their consumers. It's also guaranteed to show up in your email feed and most people will check their emails multiple times a day which means the chances of someone seeing an email from a business is far more likely than a post on social media. It can also help businesses figure out their ideal customers based on who signs up (depending on what info they ask for when signing up) and can tailor emails more to their ideal customers AKA their newsletter subscribers. Businesses are starting to realize that social media isn't the best platform to showcase their products and bring in traffic. Newsletters are the better way to go and this is why most businesses are going to encourage you to sign up for their newsletter.
I hope you learned a little bit more about newsletters and why businesses want you to sign up for theirs. If you haven't already, sign up for our newsletter! As we said above, you get a gift on your birthday and we also host VIP events just for our newsletter subscribers.
