Like your favorite song, great newsletters naturally make people want to share them.
You’re desperate to grow your readership, but your readers aren’t sharing your newsletter. If you aren’t growing your mailing list, you’re missing out on revenue. The good news is that turning this around is not as daunting a task as you think it is. Some of the most successful players in the game are doing a few simple, but often overlooked tactics to get their message shared. They are personalizing their outreach, incentivizing sharing, tracking their efforts, and making it as easy as possible for their advocates to share their newsletters.
Businesses like yours leverage newsletters as a low-cost way to drive traffic to their website and bring awareness to their brand and products. While this idea isn’t new, newsletters are gaining more traction simply because they’re getting better. I’m sure you’ve heard of Morning Brew. They grew their newsletter to millions of readers because they have great content and they make it easy for people to share and get rewarded for their efforts.
Newsletters with bland content, non-incentivized and impersonal referral programs, and difficult sharing features just won’t cut it. It’s a nightmare to waste all that time, energy, and brainpower, producing content for your newsletter, only for it to fall flat. If you’re pulling your hair and screaming, “WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?!” keep reading.
Over 92% of people trust recommendations from someone they know (Nielsen), over a total stranger. While that’s not surprising, it is often overlooked in the referral process. Think about it, do you accept invitations from strangers? Neither do I. I was raised better than that. So why are you asking your customers to send anonymous emails? If your readers are prompted to send a generic email, you’ll likely lose that potential referral. Yet, if you personalized that same outreach so that it clearly comes from family or friends, people will be more likely to read, react, and share your content.
You could spend an inordinate amount of time, money, and frustration trying to build and integrate a personalized referral campaign or you can let Gather do it for you with no coding required. They have worked hard to create a one-stop shop for building your subscriber list. Gather can help you customize your outreach so those referral emails come from your subscriber and include the receiver’s name. Now the recipient of the email is engaged because they know their best friend wouldn’t send them something useless. To boot, if they don’t act on the referral right away, Gather can enable retargeting emails.
Once you’ve elevated your newsletter sharing with perfect personalization, it’s time to take it to the next level. I have one word for you, Incentivize. Every single thing we do in life has some kind of incentive attached to it. It isn’t any different for your readers. So, what gets your readers out of bed in the morning? Let’s be honest with ourselves, they are not going to share your newsletter for free. Show your readers some love with rewards. They will be much more likely to show that love in return if you incentivize them.
That all sounds lovely, but I bet you are wondering what this entails. There are various referral reward structures out there, but I’m going to focus on those that get the most traction; double-sided rewards and milestone rewards. A double-sided referral program rewards both the sender and recipient. This is a win x3. They get rewarded and you get another subscriber and possible ambassador. Milestone rewards are based on the number of people that are successfully referred. Because the rewards get better the more people they refer, milestone rewards motivate your subscribers to refer their friends over and over again. If you combine the two, you’re on your way to a massive referral machine.
As we know, It’s not easy to build that machine all on your own. Luckily, there is already a solution out there. Wait for it… Gather solves this problem too! They have a prebuilt reward interface. They can help you easily customize how you incentivize your readers. From coupon codes to coffee mugs, Gather can help you choose the right rewards to motivate your avid reader to invite their friends to your newsletter.
All of the above is great, but if you make sharing difficult in any way, you won’t see the full potential of your referral program. Imagine a situation where your customers adore your newsletter. They want to share it with their mates, but the only way to do so is to remember all that contact information or switch between tabs to gather those email addresses. No one wants to do that.
Fortunately, there is a better way. Give your readers direct access to their address books. CloudSponge has a Universal Contact Picker that does just that. The contact picker keeps your readers from getting lost in the process of sending referrals. Marry Gather and CloudSponge together and keep the momentum going. CloudSponge integrates into Gather’s software to allow subscribers to access all of their contacts quickly and easily from the referral form. Once contacts are selected, Gather sends the emails for you. Talk about a match made in heaven.
If you asked those subscribers to navigate away from your site to find their contacts, you’d likely lose them altogether. Giving your readers the option to pick their contacts directly from their address book will multiply the referrals even more. However, at the end of the day if you aren’t tracking your referrals, you won’t know if your referral program is even effective. And if your customers cannot track their referrals, they’ll quickly get frustrated and lose interest in helping grow your business. Both Gather AND CloudSponge collect data for you, so you can gauge the health of your referral program.
Newsletters are the name of the game right now because they have massive ROI. When your readers love your content, they will send it to their friends. This brings awareness to your brand, leading to more ad revenue, traffic and sales. Stop pouring resources into expensive ads and start spending your time and energy getting readers to engage with your newsletter. Personalize, reward, track, and make it easy and watch your readers turn into advocates.
About the Author
Heather Schwartzman is the Head of Customer Success at CloudSponge. She takes pride in helping e-commerce businesses double their word-of-mouth sales by optimizing their sharing interfaces.
