Your company email newsletter gives you the opportunity to present your business right in front of the clients’ eyes, through their inboxes. This makes them instrumental in your email marketing efforts. When done right, they can increase business growth, brand awareness and boost traffic to your website. However, to get these results, your email newsletter should focus more on the customers: how you can add value and improve their lives through insightful information, resources and solutions. Additionally, the newsletter shouldn’t appear as a direct advertisement. It should strategically lure them to your business and keep them eager to keep on receiving it in their inboxes. That is why you should make the content exciting and readable. Moreover, using customer success stories in your newsletters is one way to achieve this.
What are customer success stories?
These are stories done in writing or videos that highlight your customers’ experiences with your products or services. They showcase the challenges that the customers were facing before discovering your product or service, how your product helped solve the challenges and the success that came after.
Why use customer success stories in your newsletter?
Before making a purchasing decision, most customers run to the web to look for reviews from other people who have used the product or service. They want to hear experiences that are authentic from people like them, people who are facing the same problem as them. Customer success stories share many insights that customers are looking for. They show the customers what the product or service does if it is for them as well as showing real-life examples of how they can apply the product or service. Delivering such insights in the customer inboxes through newsletters can be a powerful email-marketing tool for your business. This is what makes success stories in newsletters powerful:
Gives a cheaper and easier way to find information – Customers get the information that they need right in their inboxes. They don’t have to spend hours scrolling through the web looking for reviews and testimonials.
Authentic stories resonate better – Listening or reading a genuine success story firsthand allows the customers to see themselves in the shoes of the narrator. The fact that another person or business who is like them found a solution with your products resonates better with your customers than anonymous reviews or testimonials on the web. These stories are likely to evoke empathy and speed up their buying decision.
How to create customer success stories?
To create customer success stories, you need to get your customers to tell these stories. Start by identifying the happy and repeat customers. Reach out to them for permission and ensure that you show them the value that they stand to gain for participating. Prepare the questions that you are going to ask. Remember to keep them open-ended so that the customers can fill in the blanks. For instance, asking the customer whether he struggled with getting sales before he started using your products will get a yes or no answer. If you ask how their day-to-day was before using your product, it allows the customer to express their thoughts more.
Once you have your answers, you can start writing the story. Start with the introduction – for instance, if you’re dealing with a business, then you can highlight the customers’ goals, their company culture, and a bit about the people behind the brand. It should be compelling and catchy to make your customers keep reading for more. Move on to the challenge that they were facing and conclude with the solution and the outcome. Remember to send the story to the customers for approval before using them in your newsletter.
How to use them in your newsletter?
For your newsletters to yield results with customer success stories, you need to be strategic about them. Here are some tips on how to use them:
- Make them brief – Most people have a short attention span. They don’t want to scroll through lengthy paragraphs to gather information. Ensure that you keep the stories brief, putting emphasis on the important parts only.
- Be specific – Using just a name won’t cut it in convincing your customers. Ask the narrator to give you permission to use their full name, job title, location, and the name of the company. If you can get a photo, the better for the success story. Such specifics help with creating credibility and trust.
- Use video – Most people would rather watch a video than read the same information, which makes video a very important part of marketing. You can draft a brief story of why the readers should watch your video, and then add the link to it into the email with a CTA button. For instance, if you own a digital marketing agency, you can write how people often ask how they can benefit from your service, such as a PPC audit. Tell the reader that instead of you listing the benefits; they can listen to your happy customer talk about them in the video.
- Include a call-to-action – Your goal of using success stories in your newsletters is to drive sales and leads. Including a CTA tells your readers to take the next step to sign up or buy.
Conclusion
Customer success stories showcase real people who have benefitted from your product or service. Moreover, there is no better way to target new customers and leads than using these stories in your marketing efforts. However, these stories might never work if you keep them buried in your website. Deliver them in front of your potential customers by using them in your newsletters. Hopefully, the above article helps you understand why and how to go about that.