Today I just have one quick tip for you on how you can keep more of your your subscribers on your list using TWITTER.
This works particularly well if you regularly send out a store newsletter where most of the content is an invitation to purchase products.
Now as you may already know, its sometimes hard to keep customers on your email list if you never send them anything but advertisements.
Humans do just get tired of constant advertising. I’m sure you know what I mean personally…
One technique that I have found reduces opt-outs is to supply a little bit of content with each store newsletter that is NOT about me and my store.
Now if this sounds like a lot of work, let me show you how easy it can be using content from your Twitter account.
The Technique:
When I use this strategy in my own newsletters, it takes me no more than 15 minutes to find the content and pull it into my newsletters.
But before we start I need to mention that I have a part-time VA who manages my twitter account for me.
Every day she uses RSS feeds I’ve previously set up for her to find niche related articles, and schedule them as tweets. You can do this part yourself pretty quickly also, but I find it’s easier to be consistent if I hand this off to a VA.
So if you aren’t already regularly tweeting on your industry news, you should start now in order to make this work, because we are going to reuse the BEST of those tweets as curated links for your newsletter.
Getting the BEST TWEETS
So you might be wondering, how do I know which ones are the best tweets?
This secret is so simple you’ll be smacking your forehead when I tell you how I infallibly choose those…
I let my twitter followers tell me which articles to curate into my newsletter, by looking at what they retweeted and favorited.
In effect, I’m crowdsourcing the determination of value of each piece of content.
That means I don’t have to guess if my subscribers want this content or not. Some of them have already shown me that they do, so I know more of them will like it too.
So let me just use an example from the Brandywine Twitter Account.
The first thing I do is go to my account and go down the list of my jewelry niche tweets from the last few days, and expand each tweet to see the retweet and favorite statistics.
You do this by clicking on the tweet in the tweet stream on Twitter.
Generally I look for 5 or 6 of the most promising looking tweets to choose from.
They should be tweets that followers felt were good enough to pass on to others (Or bookmark for themselves as a favorite)
Now if you retweeted someone, and they retweet your retweet, that doesn’t count as a vote.
Only look for tweets that people retweeted or favorited for non-self promoting reasons.
Once you have 5 or 6 to choose from, check out the articles. Try to choose either using a common theme, or take a range of ideas, like one about business, one about hobbies, and one tutorial. I usually shoot for three links.
Ideally, they should all be from different sites.
While you are checking out the articles…
Open a text file and grab the Article Title and Article URL, and then write a short 1-2 line description of the article.
This short description should:
- Promote benefits.
- Tell the reader why they will like the article.
- Engage their imagination.
Finally, In your newsletter Include the title linked to the article, and the short descriptions you wrote in a section together.
I call this section “Lisa’s Reading List” in my store newsletter, which increases the friendship aspect between the subscriber and me.
I usually put these in a sidebar or towards the bottom of my newsletter so that my commercial content gets a chance for clicks FIRST…
…but there is always something extra in my store newsletter to keep people reading and opted in.
Conclusion
So that’s it for this quick Tweet Curation strategy to keep your subscribers opted in.
By using this strategy you can:
- increase your personal authoriy on your topic,
- keep subscribers engaged and opening your emails,
- and increase trust.
And of course, those things all contribute to your bottom line.
Feedback
If you use this strategy, I’d love to hear about YOUR RESULTS–
Just drop me a quick comment and let me know how it worked for you.
Yvonne A Jones says
Excellent tip, Lisa, and I like the way you went into detail to explain how it can be done effectively. While I haven’t sent out a newsletter in quite a while (this is on my goal board for the 2nd quarter of 2013), from time to time I incorporate content-curation in writing blog posts, and find it a great way to share ideas from others in my niche that my readers could benefit from.
Thank you.