The most distinct characteristic of the dropshipping business model is its low barrier to entry. Armed with a few dollars, an internet connection, a dropshipping manufacturer, and an entrepreneurial streak, anyone, anywhere, can start a business.
Unfortunately, this pro is also a double-edged sword, as it makes for an overcrowded landscape. Existing and aspiring dropshipping businesses alike must build brands to stand out.
One of the most effective methods to build your dropshipping brand online is through an email list and newsletter. If you’re wondering how to create a newsletter for your dropshipping business, keep reading. This article reveals six steps you can implement to get the ball rolling.
1. Understand the Purpose of Your Newsletter
Before crafting newsletter content or gathering email subscribers, you must understand your newsletter’s purpose. There are several goals your dropshipping business may want to reach via email lists and newsletters. These include:
- Selling Products: You’re likely running a dropshipping business to make sales and email communication via a newsletter is one effective way to reach that goal. If you’ve sold to your email recipients in the past, you can recommend new products to these subscribers on an ongoing basis.
- Maintaining Relationships: Email newsletters give your dropshipping business a direct line of communication with its target audience. After converting your social media followers into customers, you can use newsletter email campaigns to nurture long-term relationships and keep your dropshipping business at the top of your customer’s minds.
- Educating Customers: Newsletters are excellent for educating existing and potential customers about your dropshipping products’ benefits. Depending on the products you offer, your newsletter strategy could incorporate how-to video tutorials and video testimonials.
- Collecting Feedback: You can ask your email contacts what they’d like to buy from you through polls and questionnaires. The customer feedback you receive will guide your upcoming products, future newsletters, and marketing emails.
Knowing what purpose your newsletter serves will guide your decisions going forward.
It’s worth noting that you can pursue multiple goals at once. The important thing is they must be S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Also, you’ll need to keep email metrics in mind when thinking about your newsletter’s purpose. They’re how you’ll determine whether your email marketing campaigns are helping you meet your goal(s).
Examples of email marketing metrics to watch for include conversions (sales, questionnaire responses, etc.) and click-through rates.
2. Select a Newsletter Platform
You’ll need to choose an email marketing software platform to deploy your newsletter to your audience.
Email marketing tools have tons of features that can make reaching your newsletter subscribers a breeze. The most essential ones to look for in your chosen email marketing platform are:
- Email Templates: The platform should make newsletter design easy and provide templates for users who aren’t design savvy. It should also enable the inclusion of your brand elements for customization.
- Automation: Email automation features let you send email messages at scheduled times and in response to audience actions (e.g., an automatic welcome/confirmation email to new subscribers).
- Segmentation: As your newsletter list grows, you’ll need to organize your subscribers into audience segments. This feature will help you deliver tailored content that engages while keeping your unsubscribe rates low.
- Split Testing: Your chosen tool should have A/B testing capabilities that let you test your email design and content.
- Personalization: Email personalization lets you do things like include the subscriber’s first name in your emails. This feature can give your emails a personal touch that your audience will appreciate. Also, statistics show that personalized emails have higher open rates than emails that aren’t personalized.
- Analytics: You’ll need email analytics to determine whether or not you’re running a successful newsletter. Analytics will show you metrics like click-through rates and email deliverability rates, among others.
The above isn’t an exhaustive list, nor will you need every feature if you’re starting a new dropshipping newsletter. But your selection will also earn points if it has an intuitive and uncluttered user interface. In summary, the best email marketing services should maintain a balance between usability and features.
3. Choose a Newsletter Design
Learning how to create a newsletter for your dropshipping business involves choosing the right design.
The right design is consistent with your dropshipping brand’s presentation on other marketing channels. So, just look at your website and social channels to determine your newsletter’s color palette, fonts, and other visual elements.
The benefits of brand consistency go beyond creating a sense of cohesiveness and familiarity. According to a survey carried out by Marq (formerly Lucidpress), companies that practice brand consistency see a 10-20% revenue increase.
When choosing your newsletter design, determine, too, how you’ll use white space and hierarchy effectively. Spacing helps to guide the recipient’s eye movement around the newsletter while hierarchy emphasizes the key points in the email..
If you’re not the most gifted designer, don’t sweat it: many email platforms include email newsletter templates you can customize to your liking. Better yet, they also let you upload your brand kit. You can use these powerful features to design a newsletter that reflects your dropshipping brand’s unique style.
4. Create Compelling Content
The next step is to create compelling content for your dropshipping newsletter emails.
The goals you’ve decided for your newsletter in step one should guide you on what content to create. That said, you’ll want to make sure that the emails you send to your subscribers offer value, and are entertaining, educational, or all of the above. The above advice applies even if your goal is to sell dropshipping products, as warming up your audience before a sale is digital marketing 101.
Putting yourself in your audience’s shoes helps: Would you rather receive emails selling you products you may not need or content tailored to your unique needs?
Your answer should be number 2, of course.
When you get around to sending marketing emails, make sure you also write compelling dropshipping copy. That entails using concise and conversational language, crafting solid hooks, and focusing on the benefits your products offer.
One last thing: if you do business-to-business dropshipping, consider including your e-business card in your emails via your email signature. Not only will it make the process of contacting you convenient, but it’ll also make your business appear more professional.
5. Build a Subscriber List
But your email content will be for nothing if you don’t have subscribers to send it to in the first place. That’s why you need to build a subscriber list.
To collect emails for your email marketing, include sign-up forms at all your dropshipping business’s customer touchpoints. Here are some of those touchpoints:
- Your Dropshipping Website: Your website’s home page should have two sign-up forms: one that pops up when the customer lands on the page and another embedded into it (place it before the web page’s footer). Consider including the pop-up form on other pages to increase the chances of collecting emails from the customers who look around your site.
- A Dedicated Landing Page: If your business’s social media campaigns involve driving traffic to a landing page or a subdomain on your website, include a sign-up form there.
- At Checkout: This method is excellent for customers who find your dropshipping website through other means (e.g., word of mouth). If they stick around and shop, you can ask for their email after they pay for the items they purchased.
Setting up forms that help you build your subscriber list is only half the battle. You’ll need to incentivize potential subscribers to give you their email addresses as well. Time-tested strategies you can implement include:
- generous discounts
- access to wait lists for future product launches
- the chance to win free products; and so on
A note of caution concerning sign-up form placement: Make sure to keep the customer experience in mind. This advice concerns the use of pop-up forms, in particular. You don’t want them to distract or annoy your website visitors. A common way to prevent that from happening is tweaking the pop-up to trigger when a visitor moves their mouse toward a browser tab (to click away from your website).
6. Test and Send
The final step to creating a high-converting newsletter for your dropshipping business? Send the emails to your mailing list.
But before that, you’ll need to test the emails first. After reviewing it for spelling and grammatical errors, test its effectiveness by sending it to a small number of subscribers.
Here are some tips to follow when conducting your test:
- Use a Consistent Sender Name: Send the email using your dropshipping brand’s name. If your business is big enough, consider pairing the brand name with the first name of a representative (e.g., Billy from Pet Rocks Inc.).
- Keep Your Email Subject Line Brief: You have a limited number of characters at your disposal on desktop computers before the text gets cut off. This space shrinks when viewed on mobile. Thus, keep your subject lines short and sweet, or within 30 to 50 characters.
- Send Mail from a Professional Address: Don’t use a Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo address when sending your email. It looks unprofessional. Use an address attached to your domain name (e.g., hello@petrocksinc.com).
You could also take the test one step further by sending two versions of the same email to two small groups of subscribers. This process is known as A/B testing in email marketing and can help you determine the email that will resonate the most with your subscribers.
How this small test group receives your email will help you determine several things, including whether:
- you’ve created valuable content; and
- your email subject line needs reworking
Campaign metrics like the test email’s conversion rates and clickthrough rates will make the above factors clear.
Make the necessary adjustments based on the results of your test, then send the final email to your list as a whole.
In Closing
Knowing how to create a newsletter for your dropshipping business can set your business up for long-term success.
To begin, define the newsletter’s goal. Select a platform that offers all the features you’ll need to administer your newsletter. With these foundational steps out of the way, choose a newsletter design and then craft compelling content. Build your subscriber list as you go along. Then, test your emails before sending them out.
Follow the tips in this article and you’ll create a high-converting newsletter in no time.
