When it comes to marketing and communicating with your clientele, few mediums are as easy and inexpensive as email. Most people have round-the-clock access to email via their smartphones, so it’s a great way to keep in touch with your MVPs – most valuable parents! Here are a few suggestions on how to make the most of a digital dance studio newsletter and send out content that your customers are actually going to read.
Have a Clear Purpose
If you’re going to send out a studio newsletter to your parents and students, you should have a defined goal for the email. Otherwise, you may end up with a rather jumbled, unfocused newsletter that’s ultimately uninteresting to your recipients. HubSpot recommended that all e-newsletters have a common thread that ties the content together. So when you’re coming up on recital season, you might send an email that has performance-related tips and tricks, along with your recital schedule and how to purchase tickets. During your registration period, a influential newsletter might contain an article on the benefits of dance, a list of new class offerings and details about your early bird specials. When your newsletter has a clear purpose, it will be much more engaging to readers and serve as a valuable marketing tool.
Craft an Awesome Subject
When you see a book with a boring, generic title, do you feel compelled to read it? Probably not. The same holds true for emails with boring subject lines. The subject is the first thing a reader sees, so it sets the tone for the whole newsletter. If you send an email with the subject “Studio Updates,” your recipients may very well put off opening it. Inc. magazine recommended keeping your subject between five and seven words and changing it up with every subsequent email. For a newsletter during registration season, a compelling subject might be something like, “Early bird discounts on new classes are going fast!”
Populate with Compelling Content
Once you’ve established a purpose for your newsletter and crafted a pithy and engaging subject line, it’s time to focus on the bread and butter of the email. Each and every newsletter needs to have compelling content if you want your readers to continually open the emails. It doesn’t have to be award-winning journalism, but you should certainly put some thought and effort into your content. On Suite.io, former studio owner Terry Finch suggested using the following prompts to get started on newsletter content:
- Reviews of previous performances or competitions
- Teacher biographies
- Interviews with industry professionals
- Tips from teachers or choreographers
- Question-and-answer sessions with students
- Dance industry news
- Exciting studio announcements
- Original content relating to the newsletter theme.
HubSpot noted that a good balance of content is 90 percent educational and 10 percent promotional, so be sure to add a call to action at the end, but keep it short and sweet.
Don’t Forget Aesthetics
With all the newsletter programs available online, there’s really no need to pay for a platform. However, be sure to use a template that will make your emails look professional. It’s important that your newsletter is easy to read, organized and overall aesthetically pleasing. An email that is jumbled and not intuitive to read will lose the interest of recipients and possibly result in people unsubscribing. When it doubt, keep it simple – don’t go overboard with fonts and colors. You should also choose a template that is optimized for mobile viewing so busy parents and students can scroll through the email on their phones.
If you follow these easy steps as a guide, you’ll quickly learn to put together great newsletters that will engage your customers and serve as supplementary marketing material for your studio.
