| 26 May 2009
Your company has spent countless hours on developing a website and an intranet to help attract customers and inform employees. Needless to say, you will want to get as much traffic to these as possible. Newsletters can be just the trick to drive the traffic you need to your website and intranet. If more “hits” is what you’re after, try some of the tips we’ve outlined below.
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Flaunt your URL on your newsletter – A well-designed newsletter layout will include the your web address everywhere – the nameplate, or title, the masthead, and anywhere else you can make it work.
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Share your success through a newsletter – If you’re a new company or you have a new website, take the opportunity to let your newsletter readers, customers, and prospects know how much traffic your site gets monthly. Not only does this show that you’re a force to be reckoned with, but it’s also good information for potential advertisers considering advertising in your newsletter or on your site.
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Don’t be secretive – If you have changes coming to your site or if you are preparing to take your site offline for maintenance, put it in your newsletter. One of the goals of a newsletter is to drive more traffic to your site. If your readers don’t know your site is going to be down it may be an inconvenience for them and they may not return.
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Feature the Webmaster in the Newsletter – Your newsletter is the perfect place to thank your Webmaster. Not to mention it gives your reader the satisfaction of knowing that your company is made up of real people, not just numbers or computers. Plus, having an article featuring your Webmaster may appeal to the more technically minded newsletter readers you may have .
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Offer incentives in your newsletters - Here’s where you can get really creative. Have a place in your newsletter that you can offer your readers a discount, sales item, or other reward for visiting your website. For tracking purposes, your Webmaster can create a special page. The link to that special page can only be found in your company’s newsletter. Perhaps call it a “Members Only” page and offer information just a little different from what your readers have read in your newsletter or elsewhere on your website or intranet. Your readers will appreciate this special treatment and keep coming back for more.
A well-designed newsletter will do the trick when it comes to driving customers to your website through an external newsletter or employees to your site with an internal newsletter. You’ll want to develop some type of traffic tracking to keep track of the readers who are visiting your website or intranet as a result of reading about it in your newsletter. For instance, if you notice that more people are visiting your website or intranet as a result of including the web address in the newsletter, you know that your newsletter is an effective method of increasing your web visitors.