Marketers have relied on email newsletters as a way to engage with audiences for years. However, making sure your email is opened and read is becoming much harder.
Consumers are receiving hundreds of emails each month from their favourite brands. Making sure you can cut through and get your message seen is crucial.
You need to stand out. The best way to do this is to add value to your customers. Whether it be offers, exclusive content, interesting insight or resources - as long as you are delivering content your audience will get something out of, you will reduce the amount of unsubscribers for your newsletter.
Delivering a well-conceived, appealing and interesting email newsletter allows marketers to connect with audiences through a low-maintenance marketing channel.
Here are the ways an email newsletter could help your brand:
Create relationships with your customers
Newsletters act as an additional marketing platform for your brand. Use the space to highlight products, brand developments, successes, events, employee information or whatever is more important to your brand. Always have customer value in mind when deciding on content for your newsletter.
Drive awareness
Delivering newsletters on a consistent schedule means you will stay on your subscriber’s radar. Although they may not open each and every email, there may be one which spurs inspiration and encourages them to interact with your brand, so you can develop deeper connections and relationships.
Help with media placements
Creating a newsletter is a great way to boost your media coverage and placements, boosting your digital PR impacts. Thought leadership and expert comments provide instant credibility for you and your brand. Creating a log of insights through your newsletter is a great way to have expert commentary on file for whenever it is needed. If a journalist in your brand’s space is signed up to your newsletter, they may even take a quote straight from there or use it as a way to start a conversation with you.
Boost sales
For marketers needing to stay within budget while meeting sales KPIs, newsletters can be an important part of your strategy. Email newsletters can have a huge ROI. Once your newsletter strategy is in place, they require very little resource and can be an important sales driver. If you want to track the success of conversions through your newsletter, consider making exclusive codes and deals for your recipients. You can use this data to inform future marketing decisions.
Reach your audience
One of the most valuable things about having audience members opt in for an email newsletter is you know exactly who you are reaching, and can therefore be much more targeted. Mirroring this on social media is impossible, as you are sending out sales messages to the masses with no guarantee they will even view your posts, let alone interact and engage with them.
Brand recognition
The repetition of receiving a branded newsletter makes the recipients more likely to recognise your brand elsewhere, whether on social media or in person. The newsletter is a way to establish expertise. This brand recognition is super important to generate interest, convert customers and stay on top of your competitors.
Position your brand well
A newsletter filled with valuable and relevant content is a great way to position your company amongst competitors. The key to success is providing value. With the amount of emails falling into consumer’s inboxes, it is important to make sure they get something out of your newsletter, failure to deliver value will result in ignored emails or unsubscribes. Offer content that makes their lives easier or better, whether that is with great insight, deals or exclusive content.
Drive website traffic
It is important to remember one of the best ways to get customers engaged with your brand and products is to get them on site. Within your email newsletters, make sure to drive traffic by incentivizing clicks or highlighting products/services for customers to purchase.
Get to know your customers
Over time, your newsletter engagement will help you to understand your customers and what they want. With each newsletter sent, pay close attention to your customer’s preferences, clicks and buying habits. This can inform future newsletter to make sure you have the most valuable content possible for your audience.
At Motive PR, we have our own digital PR focussed email newsletter with insights from our team and other industry leaders. You can sign up to receive the newsletter here.
To find out more about how we can help build awareness for your business, please get in touch.