When it comes to connecting with your customers, there are many ways to do it. However, the top 3 options are social media, text messaging, and email marketing. One of the best and most effective forms of email marketing is newsletter marketing.
Does Newsletter Marketing Work
When you do it correctly, newsletter marketing can become one of your most efficient and cost-effective tools.
According to Sprout Social, 81% of B2B marketers used email newsletters in 2020. Of them, 87% said it was one of their top organic distribution channels, reporting an average Return on Investment (ROI) of $42 for every dollar spent.
However, the success or failure of a newsletter depends entirely on the creator. As Campaign Monitor points out, “Success at email marketing depends on your ability to build and nurture an email list of engaged subscribers.”
Newsletter Pros and Cons
The need to curate and manage an email list of “engaged subscribers” is one of the biggest cons of newsletter marketing. A process like that is incredibly time-consuming.
Newsletter Con: Time Consuming
A newsletter’s value takes time to develop—a lot of time.
According to Verde Media, engaging newsletters require a team to create content. You need graphic designers, photographers, and videographers. Plus you need writers to put the information that you’re distributing into words.
You can do it all yourself, but you’ll have to dedicate time to the newsletter and the content it requires.
Be prepared to spend a lot of time creating and maintaining an email newsletter.
Newsletter Pro: Offer Value to a Customer
However, the content you create is one of the biggest pros of newsletter marketing. This is a value that you are creating for your customer.
You offer your insight, experience, and intelligence for free through a newsletter. Customers will remember you. That’s good because it means they will already trust you when it comes time to buy.
A newsletter helps create one of the critical cogs in making a sale, trust.
Newsletter Pro: Cost-Effective
Another pro that we’ve already touched on is that newsletter marketing is cost-effective and offers a great ROI.
Voy Media points out that newsletters are cheap and powerful in the grand scheme of marketing. According to the company, marketers spend less than 20% of their marketing budget on emails.
That’s impactful, especially if you can grow your newsletter audience to thousands or even tens of thousands of subscribers.
Moreover, because these subscribers have opted-in to receive your newsletter, your return on investment is much greater.
Newsletter Con: The Spam Folder
When sending your newsletter out, you need to walk the fine line between valuable content and spam.
If you send too many newsletters that go unopened by the receiver, all of your emails may eventually end up in the person’s spam folder.
The spam folder is where good marketing goes to die, and usually, the receiver doesn’t even know it’s missing.
Be measured in your marketing. Make sure each email you send offers valuable content. Monitor the open rates of your emails to make sure that your content is what the reader wants.
Newsletter Pro: Marketing Insight
Speaking of open rates, that’s perhaps the most significant value that newsletter marketing offers. Newsletters bring you marketing insights.
Through a newsletter, you can see which links your customers are interacting with and which ones they’re ignoring. You will be able to see if specific customers interact with certain topics consistently and may be able to cater to sales or other newsletter data specific to them.
Newsletters offer a wealth of marketing information at your fingertips.
Which Email Newsletter Service is Best?
There are a lot of services out there that will offer help with creating a template for your newsletters and sending those newsletters out to your email lists for you.
Constant Contact, MailChimp, HubSpot, and Drip all offer similar services. They have ways to segregate your email lists and group them, so you’re targeting your marketing in the best way possible.
However, when it comes to email marketing, we recommend Active Campaign because it’s user-friendly, robust, and integrates with most other marketing platforms that people use.
Intentionally Inspirational founder Jason Wright says his favorite part about Active Campaign is it allows for endless creativity for people like him, people who love marketing automation.
How to Make a Newsletter Interesting
First things first, only write a marketing newsletter if you have a lot that you want to say. Remember, you need to create something interesting for people to read consistently.
In this case, content is immensely more important than routine. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t send an email.
Keep It Short
Don’t give your readers time to get bored. Keep your newsletters short. If you need to offer a lot of information or in-depth advice, put a blurb in your newsletter and include a link to more information.
The people who are interested will click the link. Those who aren’t interested will skip over it and keep reading to find something they are interested in.
Forget the Sale
Yes, you want to make the sale, but remember that the purpose of this newsletter is trust.
This is about creating trust and becoming an expert for potential clients. If they feel like you’re constantly trying to sell them, they’ll get annoyed and go somewhere else for their information.
You can try and sell occasionally, but make your newsletter first and foremost about offering value.
Don’t worry, the sales will follow.
Looks are Important
If your newsletter is just a collection of blocky text, no one will want to read it.
Find a way to make your newsletter look good while still offering vital content. If you’re not tech-savvy, consider hiring someone to help you create a newsletter template that’s easy for you to use.
However, if you’re reasonably tech-savvy, use one of the email services listed above and create your own template.
When you design a newsletter template, not only are you creating something that people can come to rely on (there’s that trust creation again), but you’re also making something that looks good when it arrives in a reader’s inbox.
Learn From the Data
As I mentioned above, email offers incredible insight into what interests your readers and what doesn’t. Use that information to improve your newsletter.
How long are people reading your newsletter? Which things are they clicking on? What are they skipping? Is there a topic that gets more interaction than other topics?
You can use this data to make your newsletter more interesting.
Conclusion
While it is time-consuming and can be a resource drain on smaller companies, a marketing newsletter can also be an invaluable source of revenue for companies of all sizes.
Email marketing is a form of marketing that has one of the lowest costs and one of the highest ROIs. That’s huge, especially if you’re working off of a limited marketing budget.
If the task of creating content seems too much to begin with, remember, you can always start small and then grow your newsletter as you move forward.
For more tips on how to improve your email marketing, check out this previous post, Tips to Boost Your Email Marketing, or if you’re still starting out building your email list, check out this post Build Your Email List (The EASY Way).
Written by Erika Towne