Who is your audience?
What kind of content interests your audience?
Does the same content interest everyone in your audience?
Why are you sending it?
What do you want the recipients to do upon reading your email newsletter?
Those are just a few questions to ask yourself while planning content for your email newsletter. Make sure that you are not just sending an email to send an email – have a purpose.
Use your campaign to build relationships. It may be important to you that you have information on a new product/service that you want to tell them about. Although, if you lose sight of what the reader wants, in favor of promoting your business, your subscribers will stop reading. Crafting excellent user experiences before in-your-face advertising is the key to nurturing leads. Having useful, informational and entertaining content will endear your subscribers to your newsletter and they will already be reading it when you decide to sprinkle in some sales based content.
Focus your content on attracting the right people to read it.
There are no set of rules; you’ll only discover what appeals to your customers through testing. Testing and trials will help you determine what’s right for your newsletter campaigns.
Click-throughs are a great way to find out what content in your newsletters your recipients like reading more about – obviously the higher the click-throughs the better. Use click-through reports to see what was popular and then tailor content and links accordingly in future email campaigns.
Try including surveys in your emails or sign-up page. Surveys are a great way of for finding out about your subscribers preferences. For example, what they are interested in and what they would like to see more of in your email newsletters, that way, you know what they want and you can send more relevant emails, which drives up open rates.
Take that next step further by incorporating customer voices into your messages, by including peer reviews, testimonials, twitter feed, and comments into your newsletter. Having your customers talk about your products for you instantly humanizes your brand in a way that even the best promotional copy can’t match.
Try customizing your newsletter with dynamic content, an element within an email campaign that changes from one subscriber to another depending on the data you have for them in your database. It’s a great way to improve the relevance of your content, and better meet your recipient’s individual needs. In addition, dynamic content has been proven to significantly increase click-through rates.
Find the right balance of informative updates about your company, industry, and guides/resources to include that are valuable to your subscriber.
Finding the right cadence for your email newsletter is important. You’ll get more ROI from your email newsletter if it’s delivered on a consistent schedule (i.e., daily, weekly, monthly). I strongly recommend testing the sending frequency to find out what cadence works best for your subscribers.
After all, it’s all about engaging your audience, so give them what they want!
Madison Murphy
Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts.com
