When it comes to Digital Marketing, email marketing is one of its best arsenals when it comes to providing a personal yet professional touch. Newsletters are great mediums for brand awareness and authority build up. Moreover, it is a powerful tool to boost your business. In fact, according to a collaborative article by The New Your Times and Parse.ly, their newsletter readers are twice as likely to become their subscribers than those who are not receiving it.
Aside from that, email marketing is a great way to build a relationship with your audience. It is a great way to nurture a lead and convert them into customers. The more your clients feel that you treat them unique, the more that they will remain loyal to you. There isn’t anything that can top out any approach with involves a personal touch, don’t you agree?
However, putting together a successful newsletter campaign is not that easy. You need to ensure that your content is strategic and that it provides sufficient value to your contact list. It should contain a certain or unique identity that your audience would crave for more instead of dumping it to the trash.
Furthermore, newsletters, in one way or another, give a high representation of your company and its culture. It is an excellent tool as mentioned above, but as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben said, “with great power comes with great responsibilities”. One mistake in your newsletter content can either make or break your identity towards your audience. We surely wouldn’t like the later, do we?
For businesses who are just starting, your newsletter campaigns should go to different testing processes to see which works for your business and your subscribers. Not only the content matters, but it also involves the right timing when to send it. Believe it or not, it gives an enormous impact.
Concerning the notes mentioned above, you may be asking, “So what do I do?”. Read through the recommended strategies below to know more.
1. Plan your sending frequency
The first thing you need to do when starting an email newsletter is to identify how much content your brand or product can produce. If you have multiple materials or product updates, a weekly newsletter might be a good strategy for you. If not, you can also go for bi-monthly or monthly.
Doing a weekly newsletter when you don’t have much content to share will only put pressure on you to produce more. This may also sacrifice the quality of your content.
Moreover, you should keep promotional content in your newsletter to a minimum. By providing valuable content, your subscribers are more likely to open your emails.
2. Build your contact list
Your newsletter campaign is nothing if you don’t have a solid list of subscribers. But how do you create a listing? There are quite a few strategies you can try. Here are a few:
- Add an opt-in form to your website pages.
- Create pop-ups to be displayed after your website visitor has spent considerable time on your page.
- Promote your newsletter using social media.
- Data Mining – However, this can come up with different setbacks. You may still need to be wary before taking this up.
However, we strongly suggest monitoring and clean up your database for unnecessary contacts such as Spam email contacts and duplicates. You may want to consider doing double opt-ins on your forms.
3. Don’t forget to say “Thank you.”
Once a subscriber opt-in for your newsletter, send them a thank you email and let them know that they are successfully added to your subscriber list.
Personalise your thank you message. This one-time message helps you start building trust with your subscribers. It also lets them know you are happy; they joined your community.
4. Be consistent with your sending schedule
The best days and time to send an email can differ depending on the type of audience you have, your industry, and the kind of content you are sending. So if you want to know the best time to send a newsletter for your brand, it is best to do a split testing.
Split testing is a process when you create two versions of your newsletter, and you send one text to one portion of your subscribers and a different version to another. This is to identify which performs better.
It is also better to do split testing on the best date and time to send your email. And once you figure out the best date and time combination, you can focus on improving the content of your newsletter.
5. Optimise and personalise your content
To keep your subscribers interested in your content, make sure to customise your copy and design. You can do split testing into the subject lines, images, body copy, call to action, layout, among others.
6. Set goals and monitor them
If you want to know the effectiveness of your newsletter campaign, you should set goals and track them accordingly. Your goals should be aligned with the overall goals of your business. To create goals, use the SMART method. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Setting an email campaign can be overwhelming. Especially, when you have a busy schedule and layering out the newsletter content itself will eat you most of your time. With this said, Ontraport acknowledges this, and that is why it continuously improves its features to cater to each marketer’s needs adequately.
Ontraport provides you with the most integrative and modern technology that would work best for any business. This CRM can give any of the techniques mentioned with ease of use and more, whether it be a simple email scheduling to an all in one campaign weapon that can put your business on top against your competitors.
We at The Marketing Arrow also acknowledge these issues, and that is why we are always ready to assist and resolve these issues for our clients. With our extensive marketing expertise and experiences working with different clients for years, we always make sure that we provide them with the most suited strategies for their Ontraport needs.
If you feel like you need to know more about Ontraport and what we can do to help, contact The Marketing Arrows today to get started.