Part of being a business owner is constantly assessing how you can connect to your customers. If you own a brick-and-mortar shop, you have the advantage of facetime. But even with personal exchanges, it’s your job to turn a regular customer into a loyal fan. You want them buying your tea and talking about your coffee to their friends.
The first two questions to ask yourself in your assessment: WHO is my audience and WHERE are they?
Regardless of the “who,” a large part of our life takes place online. It’s where we make purchases, read reviews, find entertainment and gather information. And while some members of our community shy away from social media, email is now a standard form of communication.
So it makes sense to make a connection in the inbox.
Email newsletters remain one of the top ways businesses connect with their audiences. Over 144 billion emails are sent each day, and people are opening them. Adding another avenue for your coffee or tea brand to reach a customer creates an opportunity to engage, inform and make calls to action. Now you’re not only reaching them in your store or on your website; you’re also reaching them through their inboxes.
But while newsletters are effective, they’re impossible to implement without a solid base of quality content. As we are fond of saying, content is king. Newsletters need content: content to entice someone to open your email and content to read and keep them clicking through to your website. Therefore, it makes sense to have an online content storehouse, such as a blog, serving as the springboard for great newsletters.
If you’re looking to start a newsletter, consider building up your foundation with these three content ideas:
Recipes Entice Readers
People are ravenous for food content. From Pinterest’s 5.7 billion food-related pins to the Facebook pages dedicated solely to culinary-themed content, food is a trendy topic. Don’t let someone else craft a coffee cocktail or tea-infused cookie recipe: create culinary content yourself! Link that recipe in your next email newsletter paired with a mouth-watering photo, and people won’t be able to resist clicking through for the ingredient list.
Photos Create a Strong Impression
Thanks to the dawn of Instagram, we’ve become a visually focused society. We don’t want to just hear about the coffee shop down the street; we want to see it in beautifully framed and expertly filtered pictures. Your website may have great write-ups on your tea products, but as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Your brand needs imagery. Quality photos are the necessary counterpart to the written content on your blog, serving as the eye-catching piece to draw people into your newsletters.
Pictures are the window into the everyday life of your brand. Use the pictorial opportunity to create blog posts that show behind-the-scenes action, highlight a new beverage, showcase your baristas and display what your brand is all about. Select a few photos and blog posts to snip in an email newsletter, and give people a reason to head to your website or visit your store in person.
Videos Bring Your Business to Life
Video is the future for marketing. People want to see your coffee or tea business in action. Video is a way to be more real and personal to your customers. By watching a clip of how to perfectly steep tea or the mesmerizing process of making a latte, your audience can see your brand in real life. Creating engaging videos for your business and embedding them or linking to them in your newsletters are fantastic ways to get traffic to your website. Why? Viewers are 10 times more likely to click-through and engage with video content over other types of content. Get them clicking!
If the thought of creating content seems daunting, we’re here to help. Visit Dish Works to learn more about our written content, video and recipe creation services.
Dish Works’ team of professional food or drink brand bloggers is available to answer any content questions. Need help supplementing content? Just ask!
Photo credits, top to bottom: agnieszka bladzik, Viktor Hanacek (two middle photos), kaboompics