Most of us are subscribed to at least one, but email newsletters are often overlooked as a marketing tool. With social media booming, you’d be forgiven for assuming that this more traditional form of marketing may have become somewhat redundant.
But even with online habits shifting toward social media, newsletters can still be an incredibly valuable marketing piece. Used by companies since long before the internet, newsletters have already proven their ability to stand firm as other trends come and go.
And while around 85% of people over 65 years old in the US use email according to Statista, the Pew Research Center indicates that only 45% of the same age group are active on social media. Therefore, building an established email newsletter can be highly effective if you want to reach a senior audience. Here are just a few unique benefits newsletters can offer your customers and your business.
Showcase Your Expertise
Using a newsletter to share your knowledge can help you position your community as a credible senior living expert. In an industry where an organization’s expertise directly affects beloved seniors’ mental and physical well-being, sharing your knowledge is a great way to build trust among current and future family caregivers.
Harness your newsletter as an opportunity to cover relevant topics and trends in senior living while providing helpful information you know will benefit your target audience. By sharing genuinely beneficial expertise, you can effectively present yourself as an organization that can be trusted and truly cares.
Low-Cost Brand Building
A newsletter is a low-risk and high-reward way to solidify your community’s branding, communicating with residents and potential customers using your unique voice. By pairing your brand’s distinctive colors, fonts, and visuals with useful, accurate information and updates, you can curate a brand synonymous with trust, credibility, and expertise.
Finding the right audience on social media platforms like Facebook can take time, effort, interaction, and financial investment. While social media marketing is undoubtedly valuable, crafting a solid newsletter and building an established mailing list can be quick and low-cost. A targeted mailing list directly reaches those genuinely interested in your services, naturally leading to higher levels of engagement.
Direct Readers to Your Website and Social Media
Your email newsletter can be a great central hub from which you can direct quality traffic to your organization’s other platforms. For example, driving relevant traffic from your newsletter may indirectly improve your senior living website’s SEO and conversion rate. You can include links to recent blog posts, activity calendars, or new web pages.
And by placing links to your social media platforms, you can quickly direct current and potential residents to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media accounts. Driving traffic from an email list of people who actively subscribed and have a clear interest in your community may help you build a more engaged social media following.
Nurture Relationships
Building relationships and demonstrating that you genuinely care is imperative as a senior living provider. Sending out a weekly or monthly newsletter is a simple and personal way to keep family caregivers and residents in the loop.
You might recap the latest community news in your newsletter, share upcoming events, or promote new services. Your newsletter can also offer potential future residents and their family caregivers valuable insight into life in your senior living community.
Customized newsletters delivered straight to a person’s inbox typically feel more personal than other mediums like social media. This customization can lead to better engagement, helpful feedback, and stronger relationships with current and prospective residents and family caregivers.
Quick Tips for a Powerful Newsletter
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- Avoid being too pushy. One thing that will make the reader switch off immediately is a newsletter focused solely on selling. You want your reader to feel valued, so instead, focus on providing helpful content that addresses relevant issues. Investing in your services will feel natural when you prove you genuinely care.
- Share useful resources. In the online age, we’re bombarded with information every day. Having a go-to source, you can rely on to guide you to the correct information. You can become a trusted knowledge hub by pointing readers to relevant, hand-picked content from your website and expert external sources.
- Pay attention to the subject line. Try to encompass the theme of your newsletter with a short, clever subject line that piques the reader’s curiosity.
- Keep it concise. Today’s readers want to spend only a couple of minutes reading a newsletter. A newsletter should be short, covering critical points in bitesize chunks. Keep fonts clear and straightforward, and avoid long paragraphs.
- Make it personal. Your newsletter should feel customized and relevant to your audience. Generic newsletters are a surefire way to lose readers. Research your audience and use your newsletter to address their specific and current concerns.
- Be consistent. Anything from weekly to quarterly can work – the most important thing is to stay consistent and reliable. Please don’t overdo it; receiving too many emails can feel like spam, quickly driving readers toward that unsubscribe button.
- Avoid being too pushy. One thing that will make the reader switch off immediately is a newsletter focused solely on selling. You want your reader to feel valued, so instead, focus on providing helpful content that addresses relevant issues. Investing in your services will feel natural when you prove you genuinely care.
How can SMCG® Help?
As a trusted senior living marketing agency, Scott Marketing and Consulting Group®’s experts craft newsletters that drive results daily. Our experienced copywriters and graphic designers will effectively communicate the essence of your brand to supercharge your newsletter’s success.
To discover more about our transformative senior living website, branding, content creation, and sales coaching services, request a free no-obligation consultation today.