Define Your Audience

Although you don’t have a say in the make up of your audience on social media, email newsletters give you the freedom of defining your own constraints.

What’s the goal of your newsletter? Establishing a better relationship with your existing audience? Growing that audience? Selling a product? Segmenting different kinds of customers and readers into their own audiences to deliver more relevant information? All these things are possible in ways no other form of media allows (at least not without paying and playing in the awful world of surveillance advertising).

Define your newsletter in human terms. Who is your ideal reader?

Personal newsletters tend to train their readers how to read them. Professional (customer)-based newsletters are trained by the audience they seek to serve. But there’s a lot of overlap. There are many successful, personal newsletters that also serve business needs.

The point is: there’s an opportunity for you to speak to exact audience you prefer in the way you prefer — especially if you’re just starting.

In a good newsletter, the audience always comes first. Building relationships is always the goal. But you get to define the audience and relationship, not the middle man (the social media and search companies). Pretty cool, right?

Check out the rest of this month’s posts on creating email newsletters.