Have you not yet included the Newsletters in the communication strategy for your library? Here we tell you why you should do so.
September is the month that marks the end of summer and holidays in general, both for students and for those who work.
Since school and university lessons will start again soon, bookstores and stationery stores need to communicate with customers, to encourage them to choose their books/stationery items rather than those of the nearby bookstore.
There are several channels that can be used in order to get in touch with users: from social media to SMS and phone calls. One of the most effective tools today remains the newsletter, which allows you to reach your entire contact list in a short time and gives you the opportunity to let your imagination run wild, using beautiful and engaging creativities.
So if you manage or work in a library, you should use the newsletter for your communications with customers. You have at least 5 good reasons to do so.
Make a general communication about openness
First of all, if your bookshop or stationery shop has been closed for a certain period of time in August, your contacts should be informed that the store is open again, as well as the weekly opening hours and days.
Secondly, the reader's attention should be focused on the articles and products available immediately. If you have an ecommerce, it is good to insert the direct link to your site, inviting people to make their purchases online.
In addition, given the complicated period that we are experiencing due to the Coronavirus emergency, we recommend that you also specify in the newsletter the security measures people should observe (hand sanitization, use of masks and distance between people): in order not to make the text even heavier you might think of inserting this information into a landing page, i.e. an external page created specifically (it can also be a section of the site) and include in the communication the link to that page.
Of course the effectiveness of the newsletter will also depend on how it is structured and how attractive the graphical and textual elements are. Our advice is always to look for a good balance between image and text, distance enough the different parts, and give due weight to the words, highlighting the most important ones, which attract the reader's attention.
For the creation of the newsletter, on Mail Marketing you can take inspiration from the templates already existing on the platform or create your own template from scratch: the "Do It Yourself Editor" option allows you to fully customize the newsletter, inserting the graphic and/or textual elements as you like.
Offer discounts and promotions
Are there any discounts and promotions going on at your point of sale or ecommerce? Let your customers know it through the newsletter! Report this info already through the subject line and the preheader, to immediately attract the user's attention and bring him/her to click on the email preview for more details.
In order to involve the customer even more, you could use particularly engaging Call to action (for example imperatives such as "discover", "come", "visit" etc).
Remember then to specify, in addition to the discount percentage, also the timing of the promotion: giving a "sense of urgency" to the message will encourage the user to make the purchase as soon as possible.
Another very effective technique is the customization of the text: thanks to the "custom fields" available on Mail Marketing you can customize some parts of the message, such as name, surname, but also the percentage of discount if you have thought of different promotions depending on the target audience.
Addressing the customer with his name, it is very likely that he/she will perceive the offer as thought and built on himself/herself and not as a general promotion, so he/she will show more interest in the purchase.
Taking advantage of holidays and festivities
For many companies, sales trends change significantly depending on the time of year. For example, the weeks leading up to Christmas are usually those in which there is an overall increase in demand. Everything also depends on your business: in the case of bookshops, one of the most strategic moments of the year (in addition to the current one, characterized by the reopening of schools and universities) is the one before summer. In fact, for children and young people of school age, summer is the period of "homework for the vacations" and, consequently, there is a need to buy the books indicated by teachers.
At the same time, during summer many workers go on vacation so this is also the time for reading on the beach under the umbrella. That's why bookstores and stationers should always consider creating a newsletter in the pre-holiday period, offering advice on the most suitable readings for this season.
There are also many other occasions, such as Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and birthdays/anniversaries, during which it is customary to buy gifts for a loved one. Not-to-be-missed holidays for bookstores, which can take advantage of these moments to invite customers to choose their gifts at their store.
What better tool than the newsletter in this case? An engaging communication, just before the event, would have very good chances to induce the user to choose your shop (or ecommerce) for the purchase of a unique and original gift.
Receive feedback from the customer
The newsletter can also be the means through which you can get in touch with your customers to get feedback on the service offered by the library/paper shop. In this case the communication may contain an invitation to fill in an evaluation questionnaire, which can be accessed through a link marked in the body of the newsletter.
The questionnaires are very useful because, if well structured, they allow you to get an idea of the consideration that the users of the brand have. Depending on the questions asked to the interlocutor, it is possible to get a lot of general information about the clientele, while guaranteeing users anonymity: for example, the client can be asked to indicate the age group within which he is placed, the type of profession he carries out, but also other specific information about his hobbies and preferences. In the case of books, you could inquire about the literary genre preferred by theclients, asking them to choose from a list of predefined genres. Valuable data, which helps those who manage the bookstore to become aware of what the target audience is and, consequently, set up their own communication by promoting one or the other literary genre, according to the preferences of their contacts.
Integrate the newsletter with other tools and channels
You may already know that, in the promotional field, it is the set of communication channels used by a company that makes the difference. If the bookstore has a social media page in which it publishes regularly, or a blog in which, for example, informs users about best sellers or advices on the most popular literary genres of the moment, the newsletter can become a strategic tool through which address the reader to these different channels, in order to involve the customer more and above all, very important thing, generate traffic on the site if you have one.
So if in this period you have written an interesting article, in which maybe you inform users about the latest releases in the library or, in the case of the stationery shop, about the new backpacks, notebooks, diaries available, you can send a newsletter that addresses your contacts to that post. That's why it is important to create interesting, current and always diversified contents: if people, over time, will be interested in your proposals and advice, you can also think about creating a fixed appointment (monthly or even weekly).
To understand which types of communication stimulate the reader's attention, you can rely on the Statistics section available on Mail Marketing, where you can find, for each newsletter sent, all the data related to the number of messages delivered, the rate of opening, clicks, unsubscribe. These data will be of great support for the analysis of the campaigns trend, because they will allow you to get an idea of the effectiveness of each newsletter sent and, based on these evaluations, to optimize your future communications. A little analytical spirit, over time, could give you great satisfaction.
We hope this article has been useful to you. For more information or assistance please contact us through the dedicated section on our website or via chat on our Facebook page.
