Make your sales pitch relevant to the relationship you’ve built with your subscribers

2020 has been a complicated year for business marketing. When Covid-19 first struck, a widespread panic made some people shame others for daring to work and marketing budgets took a tumble.

Despite this, newsletter marketing stayed strong. Research has found more people are opening email during the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before.

Newsletters rank as one of my favourite marketing tools. They’re the perfect relationship-builder and you can use them for brand recognition, imparting knowledge, sharing information, and of course, sales.

They’re also the perfect way to identify people who don’t want to lurk around social media hoping to catch a glimpse of you. They want you in their inbox. (Invite me to your inbox here.)

Do people read a newsletter with a sales pitch?

I got curious about what people are reading and asked some friends to send me newsletters they enjoy reading.

One person sent me their “Amazon Recommends” daily and the others sent examples from Fitness, Personal Development, and Lifestyle sectors.

Except for the Amazon newsletter which contained products, all the other newsletters contained information and tips — some were in plain text, others in HTML with photos and videos. The only thing they had in common was that none of them contained a sales pitch.

I opened up the Gmail account I reserve for newsletter signups and looked through the newsletters in my folders:

Delete Folder: This was full of sales pitches from the usual suspects, including Amazon.

Saved Items: These folders are diligently labelled with the name of the sender and contain useful information and tips that I might want to reference in the future. Assuming I don’t forget.

Only one person from my Deleted folder also had a Saved folder with their name on it.

Oh no! Does this mean that sales pitches are useless?

No, they’re not useless. Far from it.

Make your newsletter a relationship

A person can delete your emails unread, scroll past all your social media posts and still buy from you at a later date IF you give them a reason to want a relationship with you.

Work on your communication and remember everything your clients know about your integrity comes from you.

• Tune into why people want to hear from you. There’s no need to get quirky and rely on cute wordplay if you understand what people like about you.
• If you’re selling a product, every post CAN be a sales post (à la Amazon.) However, if you’re a service, making every post a pitch is just too boring. Your subscribers know you teach music, for example, and emailing them every week only to tell them about your course, the details of which never change, is Just So Boring. Plus this makes you sound desperate for business, which is never a good look.
• Don’t chase subscribers and followers simply to grow your numbers and look successful. Pitching is hard enough, without trying to sell to people who have no interest in your service.

Sales pitches work when someone feels connected to what your business promises.

Help people connect with you and a soulless sales pitch becomes something they don’t mind receiving, even if all they’re going to do with it is delete it.

1. Sales pitches are important because otherwise people wouldn’t know what you’re selling and what’s available to buy
2. Sales pitches arrive at all times — mostly when a person isn’t ready to buy, but they still tell the person you’re active and selling
3. Sales pitches are great used in conjunction with informational emails to create marketing funnels that help you target more effectively.

Whether you’re pitching by email or social media, marketing is a long-term game played on a board built with relationships.

Don’t be afraid of sending a sales pitch every now again, everyone wants to see the dessert menu, even if you’re not going to order.