Are you a prolific content creator? Want to improve your email marketing, audience engagement, and conversion with one easy step?
Do a summary newsletter.
What’s that? Exactly what it sounds like, a summary of the content you’ve created lately, especially if you’re creating content across different channels, platforms, and media types.
Why? A few reasons:
1. Not everyone participates in every media channel. Some folks are avid YouTube subscribers but only read your blog sparingly, if at all. Some folks are addicted to Twitter but couldn’t find a podcast if their life depended on it. By doing a simple summary newsletter, you bring together all of the media types under one “roof” to let people know they exist.
2. Not everyone consumes on the same schedule. Some folks subscribe to podcasts but “catch up” on them during business trips, but otherwise don’t listen regularly. Having a summary newsletter can alert them to special content that they might miss until the next trip. With evergreen content, that’s not a big deal, but if you have content that is time-sensitive, putting it in the summary newsletter is one of the better ways to draw attention to it.
3. Not everyone has equal access. If you have a significant number of business people in your audience and you’re creating content across platforms and channels, chances are that at least some of your audience can’t get to some of your content at work. Sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, some blogs, and other media channels are outright blocked at some corporations. Rather than ask subscribers to separately maintain home and business connections to all of your content, a simple email summary will help them click through wherever they are. Think of it almost as mailing out a set of bookmarks for your audience to take with them.
How do you create a summary newsletter?
Start by making sure you have good, reliable analytics data. If you use YouTube, make sure YouTube insights is turned on and working. If you blog or write content on web pages, make sure you have access to your web analytics, especially content popularity metrics. If you use Twitter and Facebook to aggressively promote to your audience, make sure you have an account on a URL shortening service like Argyle Social or Bit.ly, so that you have trackable data.
Next, take inventory of your channels. Where is the bulk of your audience? Following you on Twitter? Subscribed to your blog? Once you know this, delve into the analytics for those channels and pull out the top 5 pieces of content for the most recent relevant time period. If you create content daily, this can be as little as what’s happened the last week or two. If you create content monthly, this might be as infrequent as every six months.
Next, go through your inventory and pick one piece of content you think is high quality but hasn’t gotten the attention you believe it deserves. Make this a piece of featured content in your summary newsletter. Here’s an example:
Once you’ve gotten all of your pieces assembled, put your summary content together in your newsletter template and send it out to your subscribers. If you’ve got multiple channels, create sections in your newsletter for those channels, such as Top 5 Videos, Top 5 Blog Posts, Top 5 Recommended Links on Twitter, etc.
The summary newsletter has the power to reinvigorate your content, make sure that all of the subscribers you have get a chance to see everything you’re doing, and most of all, make sure you aren’t missing out on any business opportunities or sales because your audience is fragmented. Your email marketing list can be your attention generation hub if your source content is valuable.
How are you summarizing your best content to your audience?
Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts
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