How to Find Local Clients (And Make More Money with Newsletter Services)

Are you interested in getting paid REALLY well to send out email newsletters without having to actually be present to do it?

Of course you are. That’s why you’re reading this right now. Well, we’re here to help.

Our agency uses a system that has brought us a ton of success and we want to share it with you!

Whether you’re working with Chiropractors, Dentists, Real Estate Agents or any other niche, you recognize that email should be a vital part of their overall marketing strategies. Chances are likely that you may even be working with a business that is consistently garnering email addresses and doing absolutely nothing with them. I was there. I was guilty.

In my previous life as a Chiropractor, I was doing exactly that. We had customers coming in and providing email addresses, but the addresses would just sit in our system. As I began to dig deeper into this digital marketing world, it dawned on me that we should take this list and use it to communicate with our customers.

Now, we weren’t necessarily going to jump right into selling them something, as we know tactics like these can be an instant turn-off for a lot of people. Instead, we just wanted to use it as a vehicle to open communication with our customers, to tell them what was going on in our office and make them feel included. What do you know? The minute we hit “send,” the phone started ringing.

As a Chiropractor, of course it was easy for me to see the power of this exercise. As a digital marketer, I saw a simple, effective way to show people with businesses just like mine how to make money.

So, what are we talking about?

Step 1: How to Find Clients Who Need Your Help (And Are Willing to Pay For It)

When choosing clients, as simple as it seems, you want to target businesses who really seem to get it. The ones that are actually trying to grow and market their business. They’ve got a website. They’re active and engaged on social media platforms. You can easily spot those businesses who are putting in the effort but maybe need that little extra push or support to take it to the next level.

Too many times over the years, we’ve seen agencies spend so much time, effort and essentially, money trying to acquire business from those types of businesses who aren’t operating effectively. The goal of your agency should be to provide an opportunity to take some of these marketing tasks off their plate so they can concentrate on running an efficient business.

When our agency first got started, we were accepting clients from multiple industries or niches. Doing this greatly slowed down our operations because, as we shifted focus to each niche, we became delayed in re-educating ourselves on their individual nuances. Focusing your efforts into one specific niche allows you the opportunity to establish a powerful game plan for one client that can then be repurposed to fit the needs of others.

When you get ready to go out and actually sit down with clients, you’ll want to develop your own measurement of what a successful day looks like for you. Whether you can set aside whole days or just portions of days, you should set goals of not only how many clients you’re going to see in a day or week, but how many you’re going to close. For our agency, we’ve found that in a week, our magic number of clients that we try to see is 20. Now, we understand that we may only close 5 of these clients on these calls, but we’re mostly concerned about establishing them as a part of our sales cycle so even though we may not close them on that first or second visit, perhaps we will down the road with continued follow-through.

(Do you have clients you want to reach out to but can’t find the time to pound the streets? Check out my article, How To Get Agency Clients without ever having to meet in Person!)

What a lot of agencies don’t realize when getting started is that you can work with multiple offices in the same niche in the same town without issue. It’s not like you’re running Facebook ads that run side by side – these newsletters are internal to that client’s specific database. More often than not, these databases won’t bleed into one another.  Recipients of email list 1 will likely never overlap with those on email list 2, so similar content and format causes little concern.

Step 2: How to Write a Newsletter That Hooks Clients

In our agency’s experience, we’ve been extremely successful in producing newsletters that are topical with content framed within specific time periods. For example, if it’s October, we will likely create content based around Fall or Halloween. From there, the trick we use is to relate the business services to this time period. In our Chiropractic experience, cooler weather typically produced more aches and pains for people, so we would tie together that content by starting off with a highly relevant subject line – something that would really attract attention like “No Tricks Here, Time to Treat Yourself to Some Relief” while also stating the goals of our communication.

There’s no need to write a novel – typically, we will aim to stay around 500 words or less in our newsletters. As far as content is concerned, we’ve found that bullet point lists with tips are extremely effective. We want the audience to learn something when they read this newsletter – the goal should NOT be to sell them something, but instead to TEACH them something. So often, business owners can be intimidated by writing emails, when walking customers through informative step-by-step processes is all you have to do.

It’s all about creating what we call that “hook service.” Read our article, How To Get Your First 5 Clients In The Next Week (Paying More Than You Thought Possible), to learn more about setting up a small, introductory service to help you get your foot in the door with a business.

It can be as easy as talking about the fact that people’s aches and pains are being caused by cooler weather and providing steps to remedy those pains in a bullet point format. Using these methods makes them feel like they’re participating in a friendly conversation with a business they’ve already opted-in to.

From there, your newsletter should always include a call to action. This close does not necessarily have to be related to the content of the newsletter but should serve as a reminder of how to actually get back in touch with the business. Something as simple as “If you need anything from us, we’re a phone call away.” Your goal should simply be to close with a push for them to reach back out to the business.

Step 3: How to Save Time and Money Using an Auto-responder

Our agency uses an auto-responder called Active Campaign to write, brand and send newsletters out to these large audiences on behalf of our clients. Active Campaign is highly affordable and they have a partner program that provides a top-level dashboard to access our client accounts. Our team writes the content in advance, schedules the blasts in the auto-responder and our entire year’s work is done – all while retaining monthly service fees from our clients.

Constructing this newsletter template is incredibly simple. Our team adds the business logo at the top to serve as the header while the footer is typically an image of the business contact information. The header and footer become static elements and the only section of the newsletter that requires changing each month is the middle section, which will include the content you’ve chosen to use. Now, you have a template that can be adjusted to fit the needs of any business client you choose to pursue.

Step 4: How to Get Paid and Upsell Your Higher-Ticket Services

We’ve done all the work – so how do we get PAID?

Our agency uses SamCart for accepting payments and it has been a big help. It’s incredibly simple to set up and works very well with our financial institution in the fact that it allows for recurring billing, which means that when our client fills out their payment information, they are automatically billed at the same time and amount each month. SamCart also provides a very helpful dashboard that tracks all incoming and outgoing payments while connecting with our payment processor, Stripe, to automatically deposit into our bank account each week.

After setting up your payment processes and working with your clients for a few months, it is vital to follow up and upsell your higher-ticket services. Members of our team are big on simply picking up the phone, calling a business owner and asking how things are going with the newsletter program. Doing this gives you an opportunity to check in on the business and stay on a communication schedule with the client but, more so, this check back presents a chance to inform them of your other programs and services. Our team fully believes in taking the steps to establish a real relationship with our clients, making sure that our touchpoints aren’t necessarily all “sales calls.”

In the meantime, we’ve also added these clients to OUR email list. Approximately once per month, we will email these clients to tell them about some of our higher ticket services and why they make sense for that client’s business. We like to include case studies or testimonials from other clients in these communications to further pique their interest in these higher-ticket services we’re offering.

What questions do you have for us?

Leave us a question or comment below. We want to know what you like, you don’t like or how we can better serve your needs and make you money!

Want to hear more on this topic? We’ve also recorded a podcast if that’s more your jam. Listen HERE.