Content Marketing Today

Create a Special-Purpose eNewsletter Series To Help Your New Customers Use Your Products Better

A tips eNewsletter can work for a free trial or an actual purchase.

Whether or not you are actually sending out regular eNewsletters to customers and prospects, you should consider creating a special ‘tips’ eNewsletter for new users and/or testers.

As it frequently does, the Avongate blog inspired me with a post that was specific to software companies that need to convert free trial users into paying customers. Guest blogger, Jason Cohen, CEO of Smart Bear Software, emphasizes that you need to do something with your captured customer info, because you will be wasting data otherwise. But, he also suggested that the typical "thanks and hope you’re enjoying our software " was not much better than doing nothing.

Instead, he recommends that you do a special-purpose series of three eNewsletters that are filled with tips about how to make best use of the product that prospects are testing. 

However, you must make sure that your content is genuinely customer-centric rather than a poorly disguised sales pitch. As Jason notes, "The Tips Newsletter leads with something valuable to the user: A tip that really does help the user’s life. That’s completely different than an email that pretends to be helpful but is really a self-serving sales-ping."

The key is to make it really obvious in a gently persistent way that your users will benefit from using the software they are already committed to trying. If you do this right, you are much more likely to convert them into paying customers. What’s great about this idea is that you only have to develop a three-part series one time because you will use it again and again with new prospects.

Create a Special-Purpose Customer Acquisition/Retention Content Marketing ENewsletter Campaign for Any B2 B Product

I love Jason’s idea and believe it can be applied much more broadly to any of us who want new customers to become delighted users of our products.  We can probably all relate to buying a product that would be really useful if only we could get past a stiff, initial learning curve. Too often, that never happens because we have too little time and are easily distracted by everything else on our plate.

A special-purpose tips eNewsletter can make it much easier for our new customers to go from hopeless novices to productive users quickly. The key is to determine which elements of the products we are selling can deliver immediate and obvious benefits as soon as our users can master them.

The tips eNewsletters might be one of your most effective customer retention tools. Moreover, by making your new users quickly productive, you may well inspire them to start talking about what a wonderful product they have just bought.

This focused bit of content marketing can take your products from bottom of the drawer to top of mind for a big chunk of your new customer base.  And, as with Jason’s software example, once you have created the tips series you can use them over and over again.