Did you know that 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture their leads?
When done correctly, a newsletter email helps establish your brand’s reputation, builds and strengthens relationships, and nurtures prospects through your sales funnel.
What Is a Marketing Newsletter?
An email marketing newsletter is a form of digital communication sent from a company to its subscribers. It typically includes the company’s most interesting content, announcements, and promotions.
Writing a good newsletter email is more difficult than you might expect—you must include compelling content that will keep your audience coming back for more, while also generating traffic to your website.
Typically, a newsletter is sent out on a set schedule through a newsletter software platform that includes access to various templates that can be customized and duplicated easily.
Businesses use company newsletters for a variety of reasons:
- Help nurture leads through the funnel
- Feature published content
- Retain current customers
- Announce on company news and updates
- Advertise sales and discounts
There’s a reason why newsletter emails are leveraged by 83% of B2B marketers in their outreach efforts. They allow businesses the opportunity to communicate with customers consistently and nurture leads who have expressed interest in their brand.
Simply put, newsletter emails are one of the most powerful digital marketing tools available to your business.
Email Newsletter Best Practices
Establish a content balance:
Balance your newsletter content with 90% informational and 10% promotional content. Provide valuable content that is relevant to common pain points your subscribers experience in their industry.
Use A/B testing:
Your newsletter email is a chance to test out different subject lines or types of content to see what resonates the most with your target audience. Don’t be afraid to A/B test a personalized subject line vs. a statistical subject line or a blog article vs. a testimonial video. Developing an effective newsletter will require trial and error.
Optimize your newsletter for different devices:
Did you know 81% of emails are initially opened on mobile devices? You need to ensure your newsletter email is optimized for viewing on mobile devices, desktops, and tablets. If your newsletter isn’t optimized for different devices, it’s likely that four out of five viewers will end up deleting your email almost immediately.
Segment your audience:
We’ve all received a random, off-topic email before that completely misses the mark. Don’t fall victim to this email marketing trend—segment your audience based on your established buyer personas so that you can deliver more focused and relevant content to the subscribers who are most interested in your product or service. Recent research indicated that after segmenting their campaigns, businesses saw 30% more opens and a 50% increase in their clickthrough rate.
Establish intent:
Ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish with your newsletter email. Are you trying to get subscribers to convert? Do you want to position your business as a thought leader in your industry? Once you know the goal of your newsletter, you can cater your content accordingly.
Set goals for your newsletter:
Research the benchmark on open rates and click-through rates for your industry and set your goal for those metrics accordingly. Once you evaluate the performance of your newsletter email, you can see if the content you’ve been using is effective or not and then adjust it as needed.
The Importance of Big Data in Email Marketing
The Importance of Big Data in Email Marketing
The Fundamentals of a Good Newsletter Email
There are many different types of business newsletter emails to choose from—lead nurturing newsletters, internal newsletters for employees, or newsletters specifically geared toward current customers. However, the basic components for any successful email newsletter are the same:
Send times:
Depending on your industry and who you’re targeting, there are optimal times in the day as well as days of the week when emails see higher open rates. Do your research to determine what day and time you should schedule your newsletter email to go out.
Subject lines:
Given the fact that 47% of email recipients use the subject line alone to determine whether or not they want to open an email, you must follow best practices. Ask questions in your subject lines that your audience is looking for the answer to, include personalization via the prospect’s first name or company name, and use industry-relevant statistics that tie into the content of your newsletter. You need to generate enough interest from prospects to keep reading. Your subject line should act as a “sneak peek” to what’s inside your email—keep it short and sweet.
Content:
It should go without saying that you can’t have a newsletter email without content. Once you establish who you’re targeting with your newsletter email, you need to ask yourself what kind of content will resonate with them the most. If you’re trying to convert your subscribers into leads, then you should consider including your highest-performing content that can serve as a solution to their pain points. If you’re sending the newsletter to current clients, then you can include content based on customer success stories and wins. Newsletter emails are also the perfect way to repurpose your existing content to maximize your reach and distribution.
Calls to action/links:
Every piece of content in your newsletter needs to include a clear call to action in order to capture lead conversions and help guide the subscriber toward the action you want them to take. Another important link that always needs to be included in your email correspondence is an unsubscribe link. Not only will this lead to a lower rate of your emails being marked as spam, but it will also convey a sense of trust and legitimacy between you and your subscribers.
Sign-up forms:
Ensuring your website and other pieces of content include an email newsletter signup form is crucial if you want to increase your subscriber count. Your newsletter subscribe form can be included in your social media ads or even as a pop-up on your blog. You can even offer up a free piece of content in exchange for a newsletter subscription.
Templates and design:
A replicable newsletter template will make your life easier. There’s no shortage of templates offered through the newsletter software or tool you choose to use. Their goal is to make the process as simple as possible. Select a template that you can add your company’s branding to and ensure it will load correctly across different devices.
Key Takeaways:
As with most things in marketing, there’s a learning curve to writing a good newsletter email. The first time we launched our sales and marketing newsletter at Sapper, we saw a 6% open rate (yikes). However, after countless rounds of A/B testing and resegmenting our audiences, we’ve brought that up to 40%.
If you use these fundamentals and best practices to help you get started, you’re already ahead of the curve. Use your newsletter email as an opportunity to get more from your marketing efforts—position yourself as an expert in your field, while also increasing your content’s reach and audience engagement.
