There are a lot of reasons for setting up a newsletter, certainly, it’s an effective method of communicating with your audience. Moreover, it’s a great tool for selling your product, spreading your message and staying on the tip of your audience’s tongues. A newsletter helps a company to increase awareness and understanding of their products and services. It contributes to better relations and to get closer to your target audience and build a subscriber base.
By regularly offering beneficial content to your readers, you create credibility as an expert in your field and encourage your reader’s interest in your products or services. Yeah…! It’s easier than you think, you don’t need a big marketing $$$ or marketing department, however, you need valuable content and ideas on how to engage your audience with your brand. A regular newsletter can be a good first step into the world of digital marketing and can create a basis for further development. After that, we will need to go a bit deeper…
Goals and benchmarks
The first thing you should do is define your goals. What is that you seek with the newsletter? It’s a good idea to clarify your goal at the start because it is the key to defining your target audience as well as the style and content of your newsletter. In thinking through these, remember that successful content thrives where those goals intersect with user needs. So, who is your audience and what are you looking for? What do you want to gain through your actions and what could happen after that? But to be honest, following those 5 questions, it’s the easiest way to define your purposes:
Create relevant subject lines
A subject line lets people know what to expect out of your email. It’s perhaps the most important content element in your newsletter since it is what they’re going to see first when the email notification appears on their smartphone screen or browser popup, as well as their inbox. What makes a good subject line? It should be compelling without being pushy, giving all the information away. Try to create an eye-catching phrase without being boring. Consider your subject line as a call to action, e.g.: “Check out more here!” ; “Click here to get started!” In the end, remember your customers might see some preview text. Take a time to look at what the preview text says otherwise many clients will automatically pull this content from email body which may end up looking messy, sometimes even a missed opportunity. This extra bit provides additional information at a glance, regarding the content of your email.
Focus on content
People are constantly interrupted by little buzzes and notifications compelling them to check their inboxes — make it worth their while. Consider your audience; take a moment to define them: gather demographics and decide what topics will interest them. After that, choose your topics, including a variety of them that will make your newsletter more interesting to a various audience. It’s important to keep in mind that you need to provide readers with something they can’t get from other channels or competitors, so start writing your content a few weeks ahead of time for the campaign. The content of the newsletter should be clear. The format should be simple if the content is confusing or overwhelming, there is a higher chance that the recipient will unsubscribe. The best method in creating relevant content is to provide 90% information and only 10% sales material. By achieving the right balance, this educative newsletter will bring in more sales than sales pitch type of content.
Tone and attitude
Every brand has its own tone and manner — formal for official documents with legal implications, more casual and direct for promotional materials. While print newsletters tend toward the formal, email newsletters do not. Make your newsletter’s casual. People want to see a human behind the corporate mask and respond better to newsletters when written in the same style. Nowadays, all the business consist of communication between people; human to human, H2H, not business to business. It always works better, so thanks to that you can easily achieve more than your competitors.
Don’t miss the frequency of your newsletter
Try to inform your customers how frequently they will receive a newsletter from you, eg.: weekly, biweekly, monthly, at least every month, otherwise they will not be truly fascinated by your content. Think about how often you want to send your newsletter „often” doesn’t always mean better. (!) Start with monthly or quarterly emails, which can be a bit longer. Also, include anchor links in the top section of your campaign, this will allow your reader to click to a specific section of your campaign at any time. If you will send out a newsletter on a regular basis, your customers will remember who is sending out the emails and they will be more likely to open them because they know who you are.
Call to action
The better the relationship you have with your audience, the higher the chances that your subscribers will respond to your call to action. That’s right! Many companies make the same mistake of thinking that „ call to action” buttons and text are tools they only need to think about when they want to find more customers. However, its worth remembering that CTA is not just driving your customers to make a purchase but also push them to get to know your brand even better, become more loyal and stay with you for longer. If you send out a highly visual newsletter, make sure you surround it with whitespace to enhance content visibility.
Analyze
After you have determined your goal, how will you know whether or not your newsletter is helping you achieve them? Some statistics are needed and worth paying attention to:
Open rate
The most important email marketing metric ever! It will show you how many customers read the email, it also tells the quality of your mailing, the relationship between your brand and the audience.
Click rates
It will provide you with some insight into the effectiveness of your copy, layout, and call to actions. If your emails are not getting opened frequently enough, they will not generate enough clicks, revenue, and conversions. It’s almost a certainty that your email subject line is the problem- it really works this way.
Conversion rate
How many people took the desired action, it will indicate how successful your newsletter is at attending your goals.
Conversion Rate (%)= X of signups or purchases / X of successfully delivered e-mails x 100
Once you know your conversion rate, you can now compare it with standards. Continue to calculate your conversion rates as you try each new technique to determine which ones are working best.
Bounces
It’s better to make sure before the campaign that your list is up to date without any undeliverable, risky, unknown, etc. emails. In order to have a good delivery, you need to have a good sender score. Each time you get a hard bounce, your reputation score takes a hit. You might have hidden hard bounces on your list because email decay over time, people sign up with temporary emails or even spam you with fake emails on purpose. But there is a solution – email verification. Before sending out the campaign, run your list with Bouncer. Load your list in CSV format and analyze the results in order to exclude from the campaign all the undeliverable or risky emails. Then your open rates will get higher as firstly you will email only real people and secondly your deliverability will be secured.
Forwards
You can easily check how many customers shared your newsletter with their friends, so it will show you a heightened value to your content.
It is very important to attract your customers and let them know about your special offers or product updates. After that, they will become more loyal to your business and would like to cooperate with you even longer. Try to do your best to inform them through a well-produced newsletter!
Good luck 😉
