I’d heard for a long time about the usefulness of sending out newsletters, or monthly emails to your customers to drive sales. I’ve also been on the receiving end of overly obnoxious amounts of emails from websites that I’d bought from in the past. The thing I worried about the most, was balancing between piquing people’s interests and the thin line of not being a nuisance.

Some people told me that newsletters have not worked for them. They told me it didn’t seem to bring in customers and was a waste of time. They are wrong.

So far I’ve sent out two newsletters, one a month, and both times my views spiked huge within the 24 hour period of it being sent. Also I’ve had sales on both occasions which customers stated were directly due to the newsletter. Not bad.

As of today I have a little over 300 people on my mailing list. I sent my last newsletter out on a Monday and had a 39% open rate. That may not sound like much, but the industry average is around 18%. It generated some repeat business, and some friendly emails from customers.

A newsletter only takes the slightest of effort, and as long as you don’t overwhelm your customers, it’s a great way to advertise yourself. Not sure how to get started? I’ll walk you through it.

First step, is to go into your etsy account and edit your policies to say something like this: When you make a purchase I add you to my very infrequent mailing list, which you can opt out of at any time. Your customers will become your mailing list recipients.

Next, open an account at www.mailchimp.com. They make the whole process of starting a newsletter pain-free. Once your account is all set up, you can easily add all of the email addresses from your customers into a mailing list.

Once you have your list built, you’ll be ready to send out your first newsletter, or campaign as mailchimp calls it. To get started you need to choose a template based on how you want the layout of the email to appear. There are numerous styles to choose from, or if you have the chops (I don’t) you can build your own.

At this stage you choose images, build links, and write text to make the best newsletter you can. Mine looked like this:

Mailchimp makes it easy and painless from your end, and if your customer doesn’t want to receive newsletters anymore, it is incredibly simple to unsubscribe.

I add a coupon code at the bottom of my email to give my loyal customers a discount, and also to let them know they are part of an exclusive group.

If you have any questions let me know. You can find me at This Charming Man Cave on Etsy.