Use tip sheets to encourage clients and prospects to sign up for your e-mail

Newsletter. Permission Marketing, a marketing concept popularized by Seth Godin, is based on obtaining your client’s, prospect’s, and web site visitor’s permission to communicate with them via e-mail.

Often, the hardest part of a Permission Marketing program is developing an incentive to persuade clients, prospects, and web site visitors to send you their e-mail address and permission for you to send them your e-mail newsletter.

That’s where tip sheets come in! Tip sheets are short, formatted, documents that contain non-selling information your market will find useful. Clients and prospects appreciate tip sheets because they contain helpful information that helps them save time and avoid mistakes.

Advantages

Tip sheets are easy to prepare and can be distributed for free as electronic files. You don’t need many words, and you don’t need fancy graphics to communicate a credible, competent, professional image. Clients and prospects like tip sheets because they contain helpful information presented in a short, concise, easy-to-read format which saves them time.

Steps to success

1. Create your tip sheet. Choose a topic that either helps your market achieve a goal— save time or money, increase sales, win a race, etc.— or avoid making a mistake, like a bad buying decision. Ideas include: frequently made mistakes, questions to ask when buying, trends, symptoms, installation tips, usability techniques, shortcuts, and workarounds.

Support each point with one or two short, concisely edited, paragraphs. Write as you speak, in a conversational tone. Format your tip sheet using subheads set in a typeface that forms a strong contrast with adjacent body copy. Add extra space between lines, and above subheads, to enhance the professional image your tip sheet projects.

2. Promote your tip sheet. Promote your tip sheet everywhere: on your business cards, in your e-mail signature, in your ads, article bylines, and search engine advertising. Mention your tip sheet when speaking or attending networking events. Always describe how to obtain your tip sheet by visiting your web site.

Use tip sheets and print-on demand postcards to convert postal mailing addresses to e-mail addresses. Tip sheets promoted with postcards can efficiently reactivate previous clients and reach out to prospects who have not yet given you permission to contact them via e-mail. Using postcards to promote tip sheets avoids the many problems associated with unsolicited e-mail, i.e. spam.

3. Sign-up. Make it easy for web site visitors to locate your tip sheet. Your tip sheet and newsletter sign-up offer should be prominently placed at the top of your home page. Describe the benefits your newsletter offers subscribers and stress your privacy policy.

Set up your web site so autoresponders will deliver your tip sheet, add the recipient’s name to your newsletter mailing list, and inform you of the new contact.

4. Track your results. Experiment with additional tip sheet topics. Use different e-mail addresses or web site landing pages to determine which topics and media generates the best results.

5. Expand. If desired, you can use tip sheets as the basis for in-depth treatments of each topic. You can expand tip sheet topics into newsletters, special reports, e-books, presentations, speeches, teleconferences, and audio recordings.

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