What, you think this is off topic? Not so fast! Actually, you need to think about much more than your website’s pages when considering your SEO strategy. I want to walk through your newsletter with you to illustrate why.

Now, I’d highly recommend that, if you aren’t already sending out a newsletter–physical or electronic–consider starting. You’re not new to the idea that it’s cheaper to develop repeat buys from existing customers than to find, woo and win a new customer, right? And selling your SoyLuscious® candles is no exception.  By the way, if you haven’t already, you should sign up for the Candles of Eden Newsletter.

A newsletter is a great, inexpensive method of cultivating relationships with your existing customers and creating a steady stream of new buying opportunities for them. And it’s as easy as adding an opt-in message on your order page. Here are a few pointers:

1. Pick a theme for each newsletter.
It can be implicit or explicit, but it’s a good idea to have a theme to help you more easily gather, organize and present your information to your customers. It can be a seasonal theme, a scent-related theme built around a specific SoyLuscious® soy candle, a color theme…whatever. But a theme will help you ad an extra little oomph to your copy, and even help prompt you when you’re stuck for what to write about.

2. Provide relevant, engaging information.
This should go without saying, but sometimes it doesn’t, so here goes: this is an opportunity to connect with your existing customers and deepen the relationship. You’re basically tapping them on the shoulder and saying “hey, I know you’re busy…but I’d like to talk to you for a minute.” If you don’t make it worth their while, then they’ll eventually stop listening to you and you will have wasted that opportunity.

3. Feature a Product
In the context of a newsletter from you, it’s perfectly fine to talk about a product. Just remember, it’s a newsletter, not a brochure. Feature a specific SoyLuscious® soy candle in the form of a product review. Don’t even bother with a call to action. Just say “hey, look what we’ve got…isn’t this great?”

4. Offer a “special gift with purchase” coupon.
Here is a good way to generate a spike in sales. But any time you’re working with coupons, my advice is to do a “value added” coupon rather than a “discount” coupon. If you start pulling back in price, then your regular customers are going to simply wait until the next “discount” coupon to buy, and then you’ve pretty much just erased that much of your margin. Find something small that won’t hurt you to throw it in. Maybe even “buy any large SoyLuscious® soy candle and we’ll throw in a small [this month's feature candle], for FREE!

5. Archive your newsletters online
This is where SEO comes into play. Anything you can send out as a print or email newsletter, you can put online as an archive.  You can approach this optimization in several ways. If you theme your newsletter around a particular product one month, then anyone looking for that product will likely find your newsletter. If you theme it around “create romance” another month, then it will likely be optimized for that, and people looking for ideas to create romance will likely find you.

Your theme not only acts as a sort of narrative thread that ties your newsletters together and gives them a sense of cohesiveness, but makes it easy to optimize each newsletter for a different phrase or phrases that will help people find you online. And if they find you online and you’re giving them pertinent information relevant to their search, then you increase the likelihood of them checking out your site and buying something.

And done properly, your “value added coupon” could even help increase your conversions, so go ahead and launch that newsletter.