Digital marketing encompasses a wide array of marketing tactics and methods, of which email marketing is among the most powerful of the bunch. Email marketing, when done right, can become a direct line of communication between your brand and your customers, allowing you to achieve numerous sales, marketing, and customer support goals.
While there are many ways you can use email for marketing, sales, and support, today we are going to focus on the newsletter format, and why it matters for SMBs. No matter the industry you’re in, email is one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics.
With that in mind, here’s why you need a newsletter and how to optimize it for maximum ROI in 2022.
Define the Goals of Your Newsletter
With all the possible digital marketing methods you could be investing in, is email marketing something you need in your overall strategy? The short answer is yes, but there’s more to it. For an email strategy to be successful and produce a positive ROI, you need to know the essentials of a great email campaign and research your audience, define the customer’s journey, and much more.
There’s a lot of effort that goes into it, but the end result is worth the investment. But to ensure a positive ROI, you need to define your goals and work backwards to set the tactics, milestones, and practices to achieve them. This will allow you to promote a newsletter in a cost-effective way, reach your KPIs per department, and optimize to achieve even better results in the long run.
Some of the goals you can strive for with your newsletter include:
- Building brand visibility, authority, and trust
- Generating qualified leads for your sales team
- Nurturing warm leads
- Educating your audience and providing value
- Driving traffic to your site and social media
- Improving audience engagement
- Opening upselling and cross-selling opportunities
- Nurturing long-term customers to boost retention
Know the Customer’s Journey
To start building and optimizing a winning email newsletter strategy, you first need to collect some valuable data. Researching your audience and potential customers is an essential step in this process, as it will allow you to build a customer journey for your digital marketing strategy as a whole and adapt your newsletter for each step in that journey.
Always remember that different customers and email recipients in general are at different stages of their journey, so you need to be careful not to drive them away. Yes, you can definitely drive people away with your newsletter content and messaging.
Yes, it’s important to have good email content and you need to know how to write a good hook to inspire action with every email, but you also need to adapt the email for every customer group. If a group of potential customers are just looking for valuable information, then your newsletter needs to be purely educational.
On the other hand, if they are comparing prices and options, or if they are ready to buy, then your newsletter needs to be more transactional and sales-oriented.
Make it Easy for People to Opt In
Before we continue with some newsletter optimization tips, let’s take a moment to talk about building an email subscriber list. After all, it’s not just about delivering amazing newsletter content, it’s also about delivering it to a large enough audience to deliver results. One of the essential website features you need to have whether you’re in Ecommerce or any other industry is an opt-in form.
This can be as simple as an opt-in field on every page, an exit email popup or a contact form. There are many ways to collect email addresses, and you can even put creative offers on email popups to incentivize people to sign up. Because remember, if you want people to sign up for your newsletter, you need a clear value proposition.
It’s important to communicate what they get by subscribing to your newsletter, but it is also important to thank them for subscribing in the first place.
Different Newsletters for Different Recipients
Like we mentioned before, different people are at different stages of their journey, and it’s important to remember that people join your newsletter for different reasons. That’s why content optimization is so important, because it allows you to get positive feedback and inspire people to take action. However, keep in mind that newsletters are not just intended for potential customers.
A newsletter is also a great tool to boost brand advocacy, and you can even use it for Instagram influencer outreach and to reach brand advocates on other social networks or across the web. An influencer might not be willing to work with you if you cold email them, but if they read some of your newsletter content, they might feel incentivized to join your cause and represent you on their social media.
On the other hand, you can use your newsletter to improve your customer support processes by answering some common questions and resolving common issues your customers are facing. This way, your support staff will feel less overwhelmed, able to tackle the more complex issues.
No matter the type of audience you’re targeting, make sure to optimize your content accordingly.
Implement Value-Driven Content
The written content in your emails is probably the most important element that drives action and conversions. Your messaging needs to be clear with a powerful value proposition, and it needs to be creative, diverse, and concise enough to get people to take that next step.
Not only do you need catchy content, you also need to give people free stuff, like eBooks and other downloadables. This is a great way to promote your newsletter, and with tools like the Lumin PDF editor you can even optimize and create these free PDFs quickly so that you always have something valuable to give to your recipients.
Once you have good content, clear value propositions and valuable promotional materials, you can start creating CTAs. Calls to action are important drivers of website traffic and conversions in general, but you can also use them to drive social media engagement, shareability, and more.
Make sure to personalize your CTAs to the type of recipient and the goals you want to achieve.
Add Visuals to Your Newsletter
Email newsletters are increasingly becoming a visual experience. If you want your newsletters to stand out, you need to start introducing visual elements into the mix. This can be as simple as using free commercial-use images to give more substance to your emails, and you can also add text and more visuals to the image, like a call to action.
It’s also important to use visuals when you’re getting people to sign up for your newsletter in the first place. One of the best ways to get more leads using contact forms and to get people to join your subscription list is to use original visuals and animations to stand out from the competition.
Whether it’s just a pop of color or a completely unique-looking contact form, visual elements drive engagement during opt-ins and elevate the value of every email you send out.
Create Fresh Emails Quickly
Lastly, creating a newsletter should be an efficient and straightforward process. Your goal is to eliminate financial waste and generate results quickly, and to do that, you need to create newsletters quickly. You can do this by creating your emails in a drag-and-drop email builder so that you don’t have to build emails from scratch every week, but you also need to have some templates at hand.
Most importantly, keeping your newsletters fresh and interesting requires visualization and creating mockups. Using a mockup generator is a good way to save time and money, eliminating the need to hire dedicated visual artists. Together with an email builder, these two tools will help you keep dishing out amazing-looking newsletters, and will allow you to optimize every part of the email to ensure high engagement rates every time.
Over to You
Building a newsletter has never been easier, and it’s important to remember that a good newsletter strategy can help your business thrive in the competitive online world. Now that the web is saturated with mediocre and unimaginative newsletter designs and copy, you have a chance to leave a lasting impression on your audience and leverage your newsletter to achieve your goals.
These tips should help you create a powerful newsletter strategy and make your emails a delight to read. Most importantly, though, the tips we covered today will help you inspire people to act on what they read, guiding them to the next step on their journey to conversion and lifelong brand advocacy.
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