A newsletter is an essential tool used by companies or individuals as part of a marketing strategy. Most marketers will tell you how vital it is to build an email list, and building that list requires consistent email communication. An important part of creating a successful email campaign is your approach. You want your subscribers to feel like they are getting updates from helpful friends, informative sources, and not from someone trying to sell you a product. To make this process as painless as possible, we’ve come up with a few steps you can take to create your own Newsletter.
Planning your Newsletter
Creating your newsletter begins with planning. Setting a goal that pertains to your main marketing strategy is essential. If you want your newsletter to be successful, it needs to be well thought out, and not just duplicated information sent out weekly. Before sending, you should ask yourself these questions:
- Who is my audience?
- What goals do I have for this newsletter? To build relationships? Increase sales?
- How often should my audience receive my newsletter?
- What kind of content will be in my newsletter?
- How do my clients benefit from subscribing
Once you’ve answered these questions and created a plan, you can start to execute your plan. If you’re worried that you will be sending hundreds of emails from your personal inbox, you can rest assured that the process is much more simple. Sites such as Mailchimp can be used as an automated email builder while also offering many customization options.
Finding what company works best comes down to personal preference, but it’s important to remember that the success of your campaign is directly correlated to the quality of the newsletter content.
Create a Template
One of the most important steps in creating your newsletter is creating your template. This template will be what you use each time you create your newsletter design. This makes creating future emails simple and uniform.
Utilize Automation Options
Making your email campaign as effective as possible is vital. Spending too much time creating individual emails from scratch can be a huge waste of time, and takes away focus from creating efficient content. Reputable email marketing services will provide automated options.
This option can be incredibly helpful in generating traffic to your site. For example, you can send a welcome newsletter to new users when they join your site or more specific options for subscribers’ birthdays that can even include special offers for such occasions.
Following Newsletter Statistics
As you create a following for your newsletter, it’s important to keep your content interesting and informative. It’s critical that you don’t get lazy with your email campaigns if you want your message to remain effective. Creating your email lists and designs are important, but monitoring how well your campaigns are working is essential to business. Here are some of the main numbers to keep an eye on in all of your emails:
-Subscriber growth: This helps to determine how many new users have subscribed to your newsletter.
-Open rate: This shows how many recipients have opened your email.
-Click-Through Rate (CTR): This shows how many viewers clicked on at least one link while viewing the newsletter.
Your email marketing program should provide these metrics, and once you’re able to access them, you can start to make any needed improvements. Often these can be simple changes such as making sure your links are clearly outlined so that subscribers aren’t skipping over them, or making sure your topics are interesting and lead to engagement. Sometimes your engagement is directly correlated to the promotion, so you may need to check your social engagement on your website as well as any social media accounts linked to your business.
After you’ve gotten these engagements mastered, you can begin to tailor your newsletters to define a target audience within your campaigns. Focusing on specific subscribers who are more likely to be interested in a topic can raise your click-through rate and in the future will be sent information that matches their interests.
The Importance of a Newsletter
You may be under the impression that your customer’s inboxes are full and they are uninterested in receiving your newsletter, but this simply isn’t true. There is always room for informative subscriptions that offer valuable content and solutions. Sending newsletters is an incredibly cost-effective method to engage current subscribers and keep in contact with potential customers. Utilizing this powerful tool keeps funds in your pocket for future advertisements and promotions.
If you need help executing and creating your own newsletter, shoot us an email at info@foleymarketingadvisors.com – We’re always happy to help!