The Simple, Yet Effective Power of Newsletters in Digital Marketing

One of the most overlooked, yet valuable tools in the solar company’s marketing toolkit is their ability to send newsletters to their email list. Sending a regular newsletter will help to build trust and stay relevant with your audience of clients over time. Consistently building content for your regular newsletter will allow you to repurpose the content for things like ranking better for the search terms that matter most in your business. 

In HeatSpring’s Digital Strategies to Grow Your Solar Business free course, Bill Hoelzer of Volta Strategies shares how his clients follow the Just A-S-K method to see huge gains in client referrals and visitors from organic online searches. Just A-S-K stands for Automate. Send. And keep going. Tune into the clip or read the transcript below to hear an excerpt of Bill’s digital marketing chat. To hear the whole presentation, enroll for free in Digital Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Solar Business. 

Let’s talk about newsletters a little bit. Most contractors that I talk to have the sense that they should be sending a newsletter, but they just can’t seem to find the time to do it. And I’m here to say that you should just do it.

You should just do it. 

Sending a regular newsletter is one of the most cost effective things that you can do to build an audience of people that know and trust you, right? And that’s all you need to boost referrals and repeat business. It’s also worth saying,  some consumers are just really shaky right now. If we do go into a recession, an audience of people that trust you and have your back is the number one thing that you can do to position your company to weather whatever the market brings.

Of course, there are better and worse ways to send a newsletter. So I’ll get into just some of the details here. The goal with this is to serve your audience, right? And this is really what separates good marketing from bad marketing, right? Bad marketing is gross. People are just going hard to the hoop. Let’s close that deal, get that sale. 

But if you orient yourself around serving your audience, that’s where you’ll see success over the medium and long term. Address any questions or concerns that they have related to your work. Over time, you’ll build this audience of customers who trust you and they think of you first when they think of solar.

And this is an important point, right? Every newsletter should reference your referral offer at the bottom. And this positions you to get the call or to earn that referral when the time comes because referral opportunities happen organically, right? You know, the neighbor asks, how did that solar project work out? That’s when the opportunity arises. You need to stay top of mind. Not over days, but over weeks, months, and years.

It’s not just about referrals with your newsletter, right? Your newsletter goes out to everybody who makes contact with your company, including people who got estimates but haven’t completed projects yet.

Imagine that you’re a homeowner and you’re considering a project. It’s a pretty big one, so you get estimates from three different companies, but you take maybe up to a year to make a final decision.

Throughout that year, one company follows up with you not to close the deal, but to keep you up to date about changing incentives and strategies to save energy at home. By God, maybe you even look forward to reading their newsletter. Which one of these companies would be most likely to earn your trust and your business?