While you should be putting effort into creating a solid and recognizable digital space through your website and social media, having a strong direct connection with your dance family is important. You might be posting consistently to Facebook and Instagram, but those platforms aren’t strong centers for keeping your current customers in the loop. You want to be able to show off your highlights and your big events and keep your less exciting details (potential customers don’t care about costume deadlines), where they are easy to access.
That’s where email newsletters come in.
More Space than Social Media
What goes in an email newsletter? The important stuff. When you send an email to all of your dancers and their parents, you want them to get the sense that every update is useful to them. An email gives you the space to share all the details about deadlines, trip planning, and your favorite dance news links, so you can send out detailed and thoughtful messages to your dance family and save your highlights (all those gorgeous dance pictures, event news, and competition wins) for social media.
No Algorithms
One of the major downsides to sharing essential updates and information over social media is that most of your followers won’t see them. Facebook and Instagram both use complicated algorithms that determine what every user sees based on traffic, interest, engagement and more. Sounds complicated, right? Sharing important updates shouldn’t be. Save things that you need everyone to see for email. You can always post an abbreviated version on your social media pages if you want them to be public as well.
Personal and Organized
Your email newsletter is handcrafted by you to send off to your dancers and parents, but it gets better. It can also be directed to specific groups. If you have multiple teams with different priorities and events, you can create multiple smaller newsletters. Specific updates can be sent to individual groups instead of every dancer and parent that goes to your studio. Everything can be organized and sectioned off based on what you need to accomplish.
But how do you get all of this done?
Keep a Schedule
Whether you are sending a weekly newsletter to people you see every day or a monthly newsletter to people that might not be customers but keep up with your studio from afar (you know, all those fans that love your routine videos and cheer you on during competition livestreams), you want to stay consistent. Whatever your schedule is, keep it up. Newsletters keep your studio on their mind, but that will be harder to achieve if your updates are sporadic.
Curate Carefully
For your newsletter to be effective, it needs to be focused. Don’t share personal updates or cat videos in your newsletter. Share information relevant to schedules, registration, events, and even dance advice. If your newsletter is too all over the place, people won’t know what to expect and they’ll start to question why they subscribed in the first place.