This was my first foray into creating and delivering an email newsletter for my own business. I chose MailChimp because with your free account (<2,000 subscribers and <12k emails sent/month) you get nearly full functionality. I haven’t noticed anything that I don’t have access to yet, and it was surprisingly simple to set up a clean email for my clients/subscribers. One note: it definitely helps to have a little bit of HTML coding background if you want to customize any of the formatting, including formatting tables for mobile viewing, image resizing and others. So let’s talk about your brand story!
I was surprised at how few craft beverage brands that I’ve studied recently clearly articulate their brand story…anywhere. Website and social efforts are the most obvious miss, but many brands only reflect their voice and personality as well as any type of story in their tasting/tap rooms. And that’s not even guaranteed. So this newsletter focused on asking the questions of your brand that customers are sure to ask – better to answer them first and help your brand become discoverable.
- Knowing the origin story
- Describe the company mission
- What is the company vision
- Define the business of your company and the product it delivers
- Describe the product quality and features in customer terms
- List the benefits or advantages you want customers to associate with your brand
- Identify how you differ from competitors
- Describe why a customer would find you relevant or meaningful to them individually
- What voice will you be using to communicate
- Define the promise you will make to existing customers and prospects
MailChimp archive:
https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?u=ec1f6af0f864b57fe54bb5e19&id=1b8250d84e
Download:
https://app.box.com/s/z0y144mmv8ubmw5emsp3ec2pmrhd2ltt
You can also find past newsletter issues in the Downloads section.
A three-sentence brand story won’t answer all of these questions. The purpose of the exercise is to answer the questions for yourself, your team and ultimately your customer to help everyone understand what your brand stands for and why it should matter to them individually. Hope this helps, cheers!