Blog — November 25, 2011 15:31 — 2 Comments
e-Newsletters: Good for your business, good for your brand
Everyone’s inbox is a crowded place these days. With e-newsletter open rates hovering around the 20pc mark, is there still a compelling reason to publish your company’s content in the form of an e-newsletter?
The answer is a resounding yes.
What are the real benefits of a company e-zine?
For a start, a regular email newsletter keeps you and your brand in customers’ minds. If your e-newsletter is full of useful and informative content your customers start to identify you as an expert in your industry, and look forward to your newsletter each month. With any luck, they start sharing your newsletter content with their network, in effect referring you to their contacts.
Developing content for a regular newsletter makes a company focus on its customers and what topics they are interested in. This has the knock-on effect of bringing the customer to the forefront of wider company decisions.
Most email newsletter delivery systems come with in-built analytics, an invaluable tool to help you get to know your customers. By analysing what content is most popular with readers, you can better shape future sales and marketing campaigns.
All of these benefits are based on having a successful newsletter that your customers are actually opening, reading and enjoying. That means you really need to think about the content.
What type of content?
Yes, your readers probably do want to know the latest news about your company. But your company e-newsletter is not a place to focus only on self-congratulatory news or blatant selling; the content needs to be informative, interesting and useful.
Case studies: We’ve blown the case studies trumpet before, but it’s worth reiterating how popular these real-life customer stories are. Don’t just stick with written case studies though, consider adding video case studies to your newsletter. At an informative webinar recently on the topic of email marketing content strategy, denise cox, email marketing expert at Newsweaver, told attendees that video content can get up to three times more clicks than written content.
How to/top tips: These helpful articles can really boost your credibility. Take time to identify challenges your customers may be facing and provide them with useful tips to deal with these issues, e.g. if new legislation has recently come in to play in your sector, give useful advice on compliance.
Get to know the team: Use your newsletter to humanise your company. A ‘meet the team’ type article or Q&A session with a different member of staff in each issue is a good way for customers to get to know the people behind the company.
Company/industry news: Do keep customers up to date with any relevant company news, product launches, new appointments, but in nice short articles. But when your customers think about you and your brand, you’d also like them to think “authoritative” and “expert”. So why not add in pertinent industry news, too? Your customers will know you’re keeping up with anything important going on in your sector.
What about those open rates?
With open rates low, you need to give your readers more than one opportunity to spot that you’ve just published something. Pressing the “send” button on your e-mail newsletter isn’t the only step you should take to tell your readers you’ve got a new issue out there. Everyone at your company should be using their individual social networks to publish snippets of content from the newsletter as status updates.
For any company considering an e-newsletter, buy-in at all levels is essential. It needs to be a company project and not just a marketing project – this will determine the quality of the content, which is ultimately the key to the success of your newsletter.
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Deirdre
In many ways this reflects a similar trend in Television. Many pundits were quick to predict the demise of TV as more and more people made their own entertainment choices thanks to the web. In reality it’s not happened. Instead TV seems, if anything, to have been enhanced by the web — especially social media — as it’s created a means for people to generate real time community around specific programmes such as X Factor and many others.
Similarly, many have been arguing that the emergence of social media would sound the death knell of email. Not so. We’ve seen how key groups interested in a newsletter’s content can be more easily found and its content shared through social media. In one example a client’s traffic to an article in it’s regular email newsletter generated more traffic from unknown sources via social media than through the subscriber base.
The point is, the email newsletters still has a valuable role to perform as one of many ways to share relevant information with interested audiences.
Cheers
Ralph
@ralphenn
A quick PS thought…
I’ve noticed how Newsweaver, one of the email newsletter services ENNclick uses, is introducing much more tightly integrated links to social media networks which can be embedded in email templates.
See Easier Social Sharing