The Power of the Newsletter

We just celebrated the sixth birthday of our weekly boater newsletter. On one hand it sounds like a celebratory moment, and then we quickly move on to the next topic. But let’s slow down and look at the other hand and think about what this means for our marina and how this might be the greatest opportunity for your marina.

Every week we communicate with our customers, including during the winter months. That’s not a simple task in the middle of winter in Minnesota, but our goal is to stay in touch with our customers and that brings a lot of rewards.

Building Loyalty

Email marketing is all about building customer loyalty. Building loyalty begins with sticking around. When you stick around you build trust and as a result your customers bond with your marina. Case in point, a good open rate for an email is about 15%, currently we are over a 50% open rate, on our weekly newsletter. Why? It’s because our customers want to hear from us!

Again, this might draw a congratulatory moment, so why would you want to create a weekly email for your customers? It’s kind of a sneaky question because the answer is the question. You are creating the weekly newsletter FOR your customers. When the email is useful and valuable for your customers, they will open it. The super cool part is when your customers actually wait for your newsletter. We have customers who tell us they wait for our newsletter to plan their weekend. We also have a lot of “snowbirds” who love our newsletter over the winter because they are able to stay in touch with their favorite lake!

You still may not be on board with why you would go through the effort of cultivating and nurturing an email newsletter for your customers. After all, it’s an investment of time. We spend approximately two hours a week on our email newsletter. But the reason you spend this time bonding with your customers is so you can continue to contact them and eventually share special opportunities and items for sale.

Notice how I snuck that “items for sale” topic in there. When you are doing any sort of email marketing you must respect the boundaries of your customers and honor the privilege of gaining access to their free time and their phone! All of the time you spend sharing information and building trust is rewarded when you approach your customers with your latest gas discount, new T-shirt for sale, or even a special on soda in your ship’s store.

Just remember not to get “sale” crazy. If you are like me, you have a whole bunch of unread emails in your inbox because all the sender wants to do is to sell you something. It is boring and predictable and as a result will not get opened. On the other hand, if you send information your customer wants to receive, such as what’s happening on your lake, it will get opened. I say this with six years of experience and an over 50% open rate for our marina newsletter. I want you to have this success as well. Here are my top three tips to creating an email newsletter that gets opened.

Tip 1: Consistency. If you were dating someone and this certain someone contacted you every day then disappeared, then came back a couple days later, you would lose interest and lose trust. It’s exactly the same for email marketing. You must build trust, and this happens by sending your email at the same time every week. We named our newsletter “Tonka Thursday” so that every Thursday it arrives in our customers’ email boxes.

Tip 2: Useful. Your email should be what your customer wants to read, not what you want to tell them. While you may want to sell an oil change, your customer wants to know where the live band is playing. See the difference? The oil change can be mentioned as a brief “ad” in your newsletter but make sure to find out what they want to read and give it to them! HINT: this probably involves the things they can do to enjoy their boat.

Tip 3: Easy. You want this newsletter to be easy for you. This includes how people sign up, how you find things to write about, and how it is delivered. You must use an email service provider when you create an email list for marketing because it’s the best option to remain compliant with the can-spam laws. This company will have sign up forms that are easy to install on your website. Just don’t forget to make a paper form that you put right on your counter to get even more people to sign up!

Bonus Tip: When you get your email up and running, start looking for companies that provide referrals for promoting their products. Typically, the sign-up information is at the bottom of every retailer website. This is an excellent way to start making money without having to ship or send an item! Really… it works.

If you have more questions on how to set up your email marketing system or expand the revenue side of it, feel free to send me, you guessed it, an email!