Newsletters are an important part of any email marketing campaign and, when done properly, they can lead to increases in sales and wider brand awareness. Unfortunately, far too many companies don’t appreciate the importance of a well-crafted newsletter and instead do half a job of it, or don’t do it at all!
Particularly great for e-commerce stores running on Shopify and PrestaShop platforms, newsletters sent via an email marketing campaign gets the word out about your company and helps you nurture long-term growth.
5 Tips for Effective Newsletters for your Email Marketing Campaign
Here are a few tips you can use to help craft your email newsletter and improve your email marketing campaign.
1. Have an Audience
A newsletter has its biggest and most profound impact when there is an audience ready to read it. There’s very little point creating an amazing newsletter to try and improve your email marketing campaign for it to just fall on deaf and non-existent ears.
At the time your company begins writing email newsletters, you should be past the initial growth stages and already have an audience eagerly awaiting to hear from you. Your newsletter should be packed full of information that is geared towards this audience, too.
2. Watch Reactions from Your Customers
You shouldn’t really add newsletters to your email marketing campaign until your customers begin looking at your company as an authoritative source of information.
Usually, by the time a business has established a reputation as an authoritative voice within the industry, your customers will start asking for more information from you. This is usually a good sign to start creating and sending out newsletters because your audience is engaged and wants to hear from you.
Watch out for signals coming through your social media pages and posts, customer support pages, and discussions through social media channels.
3. Do Research Before Creating Content
An effective newsletter is packed full of relevant, engaging, and high-quality content. Before you can write this content, though, you need to do research… and a lot of it!
You can’t just write any old nonsense in your newsletters. Doing this is a sure-fire way to disengage people who were ready to listen to you and have them unsubscribe from your email marketing campaign.
Take a look at the newsletters that are sent by your competitors as a source of inspiration. What do they include in theirs? What format do they use? What’s their content like? How often are newsletters sent?
This is a great place to start. Don’t copy them, though!
4. Set a Budget and Schedule
Newsletters require careful planning and timely execution. You can’t simply just go ahead and start firing off emails left, right, and center. Doing this will annoy your subscribers and you will quickly run out of things to say.
It also takes time to begin seeing results from your email marketing campaign. Don’t expect to start seeing sales flooding in immediately. Instead, focus on creating high-quality content according to a budget and schedule that you will stick to. By sticking to a budget, you won’t run out of marketing funds and by sticking to a schedule your customers will know when to expect the next installment of your newsletter.
5. Balance Your Newsletter So It is Both Exciting and Trustworthy
Many companies that do use newsletters for their email marketing campaign know that they should be written in a way that builds trust and establishes authority with their audience. Unfortunately, many companies also forget that a good email newsletter is about more than establishing trust and authority—it’s also about emotion and invoking a response.
Readers will disengage from the best email marketing campaign newsletters if they are dry and don’t have any emotion attached to them.
You should write your newsletter content in a way that helps to establish your business as trustworthy whilst still involving topics, information, and stories that will build up an emotional connection or foster an emotional response. Once you have figured out how to strike a good balance between the two, you will notice a better response to your newsletter and more favorable results.