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Lots of companies and brands consistently create useful, informative content … that just sits on a website, hidden on a page that takes too many clicks to find.
Marketers looking to get more out of their content, including blog posts, need to really capitalize on their thought leadership by delivering it to the right audience at the right time. Otherwise it will be out of sight, out of mind.
How can marketers improve content engagement and views? Email newsletter.
Disseminating your thought leadership and content in general through email newsletters has a significant impact on readers: it improves brand exposure and increases speaker awareness. Not to mention, newsletter subscribers are more concerned with the brand.
As a result, every company – from leading news publications to D2C brands to martech vendors – offers its subscribers personalized newsletter content. Consider the following statistics:
- Newsletters have an average open rate of 22%, compared to a fraction of that percentage for audience-advertising interactions on Facebook.
- Greentech Media’s newsletter visitors spend 80% more time on the website than visitors to other channels.
- Vox newsletter readers spend an average of 110 seconds on the page, compared to just 40 seconds for Facebook visitors.
- New York Times visitors are twice as likely to become paying subscribers by first subscribing to a Times newsletter.
Newsletter: The cornerstone of your email strategy
Newsletters are the cornerstone of a successful email strategy because they build trust with your subscribers.
But brands can’t just toss content links in an email and hope subscribers get the notice. You will not. Instead, marketers need to make the newsletter comfortable and engaging, and use a more talkative tone with subscribers.
Email is bombarding us all on a daily basis, especially in the past two years. The increasing competition for subscriber attention requires reaction and adaptation from marketers hoping to get more out of content and blogs.
At Litmus, for example, one of our top performing newsletters, Litmus Weekly, suddenly became less effective in 2020. Open rates and click-to-open rates fell. It didn’t drive the traffic like it used to.
With 54% of companies having increased email volume, we could have attributed this to increased competition across the board and couldn’t have done anything about it. But we’ve made some changes:
- Optimized reading experience through creative stimulation of readers to scroll through the entire newsletter
- Injected our newsletter with elevated personality and a company story / voice
- The right content included in the newsletter, not everything
Now readings have returned to previous levels and are better than the pre-pandemic numbers.
How can you implement changes and improve your newsletter and content metrics?
Email best practices for optimizing newsletters
Newsletters are certainly different from other e-mails, such as B. Notifications of abandoned carts or brand awareness campaigns. Everyone has a different goal. But many of the best practices stay the same: make a human connection; provide relevant information, content and news; and ensure the right design techniques.
Here’s how to adopt these newsletter best practices.
1. Connect to your subscribers
As with other campaigns, an overarching newsletter goal is to target an audience – a simple but often elusive goal.
To be able to connect, you need to understand what your subscribers want from you and what you want from them. How to get the most out of newsletters:
- Identify your primary goal and create content to achieve it. Newsletters can accomplish several goals or outcomes: generate website traffic, increase app usage, etc. Choosing a primary goal increases the likelihood that you will achieve it. It also helps ensure the use of a single call to action; using more than one creates confusion and dilutes results.
- Set expectations in advance. Use a welcome email to let your subscribers know what to expect – the type of content, how often, etc. – when they subscribe to your newsletter. Also helpful: Immediately offer something valuable, such as an “exclusive” report or a free trial version.
- Keep your airtime constant. Subscribers should know when to expect your newsletter. For example, our monthly newsletter goes out every last Tuesday of the month. If you are unsure of the right day and time to send your newsletter, give it a try. Send it out on different days and see which one generates better engagement.
2. Offer relevant information, content and news
It may seem obvious to include branded, relevant content in your newsletters, but many marketers toss random links and graphics into an email to take up space and appear informative. Avoid that kind of clutter. Instead of this…
- Find the right balance between educational and promotional materials by offering different types of content to drive engagement.
- Give your subscribers context about what to expect when they click through, rather than using call-to-action buttons or phrases like “Learn more”. This also makes your email accessible to subscribers with a screen reader.
- Offer stakeholders an easy way to become newsletter subscribers and unsubscribe if necessary. Otherwise, newsletters can be marked as spam, harming your email deliverability and reputation.
- Ask subscribers what content they would like – if you’re not sure. But most importantly, they make it easy for them to give feedback – otherwise they won’t. Something as simple as a poll at the end of a newsletter works wonders.
3. Make your reading experience more enjoyable with design best practices
Make newsletters easy to read and easy on the eyes of the subscribers, with these creative and design-oriented tips:
- Newsletters need a sense of content hierarchies and delimited sections so that the newsletter can be easily searched. Use headings and CTA buttons that stand out and grab readers’ attention. Make friends with spaces too. Effective use makes even the busiest newsletter easier to digest.
- Add different types of pictures. Use illustrations, stock photography, and animated GIFs to visually engage subscribers as they scroll.
- Keep the total size of your newsletter under 102 KB, especially if you have a high percentage of Gmail subscribers. Anything over 102KB will be truncated in Gmail and may display less than half of the email.
- If this suits your brand, look, and feel, use bold colors.
B2B brands tend to be less creative with newsletters, but they don’t have to be.
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Marketers invest a lot of time, money, and resources into creating content. Don’t let it go to waste. Harness the power of email – and newsletters in particular – to increase content awareness while driving traffic and engagement.
Additional resources on best practices for email newsletters
Building your email newsletter is a marathon, not a sprint
How to Create an Email Newsletter People delete their calendars for reading [B2B Forum]
Put the “letter” back into the “newsletter”: Ann Handley talks about marketing smarts [Podcast]
