This is the time of year when almost all of us set aside time for family, but if you own a family business, the togetherness doesn’t end on January 1; it’s 365 days a year. Create My Newsletter was formed to help our small and family business customers take the next step toward increasing engagement, sales and measuring how their marketing messages are landing, all in an affordable way. In honor of Thanksgiving, this newsletter is dedicated to marketing for family businesses.

It’s still about the email…

We keep hearing so-called experts say that email is “dead,” that people have moved on to bigger and better things. And yet, every study that comes out about clicks, sales conversions, brand awareness and other marketing buzzwords shows that not only is email alive and well, it’s the best way to reach your audience. Take one of the most recent studies from Adobe, confirming that email reigns supreme. From the study report:

“On average, survey respondents report using email six hours a day, or 30+ hours a week. Nine of 10 respondents say they check personal email at work and work email from home. More than one third report having multiple personal accounts.”

Wouldn’t you prefer to use your marketing dollars on a platform that is all but guaranteed to reach the people who are most interested in using your service or product? That’s the power of targeted e-newsletter marketing to an opt-in recipient list. Plain and simple.

…but it hinges on the message
Now that we agree on the medium (email), we can talk about the message (your brand). The same Adobe study shows that while a whopping 58% of people of all ages say that email is their favorite way to be contacted by a brand, more than a third say they prefer fewer repetitive emails, even from the brands they have a relationship with. This is bad news for companies with a strategy of bombarding customers with annoying messages that don’t resonate. But it’s a great opportunity for companies who want to provide a personal touch with carefully crafted email messaging.

We find that our family business customers are all about the personal touch, which is why they do what they do. This attitude also influences what they want in a marketing strategy and we find it’s the number one reason that family businesses come to Create My Newsletter—we believe in a personal touch too.