A digital newsletter can be an effective marketing tool on its own. A list of its advantages reads like the ultimate weapon: it has a higher open rate than email marketing, it can enhance your image, contribute to customer support, increase sales, promote your logo, generate loyalty and is a medium for customer communication. And the icing on the cake is that it is so much easier to attract subscribers to a newsletter than to email marketing lists.
But there is another function it can perform which should be its main objective. A newsletter is a cost effective way to get people to sign up for email marketing. So how should you go about it?
Define those you want to get onto your email lists. Unless you target your efforts, you are wasting them as well as money. Once you know who your are after then everything on the newsletter should be aimed at getting them to subscribe to your email lists. As soon as you know what you want and who you want it from you are ready to create your first newsletter.
Everything you put in it should encourage readers to subscribe to your email lists. However, a page that is blank apart from the tick-box will not do that. It is pointless trying to cheat your subscribers. The content should be valuable, to them more than you of course. This will increase open rates and encourage reading. But do not give everything away at once.
Many newsletters have a brief introductory paragraph on a particular subject with a hotlink to a landing page. There readers will find the full article together with a big push to get them to sign on to email lists.
Your prime business is email marketing so why not keep back some material for those who subscribe to your email list. Again, do not cheat the customers by making the content of the newsletter of no value without signing on.
Whilst some readers, probably the scary ones, will save all the articles, if you collate the back issues and put them onto a searchable database, maybe with additional material, it will be an attractive feature. But only for those on your emails lists.
Email marketing software is just as effective with newsletters so you will be able to tell open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes, how many times it has been forwarded and, most importantly, the precise number of newsletter readers who moved on to subscribing to your email lists.
Further, a newsletter will allow you to build a profile of your subscribers. The particular articles they click through to will show when you have been correct in your choice of subject matter. You will also know what kind of email marketing they would respond to when they finally tick the box.
A newsletter is a useful marketing tool in its own right but it shines once it is used to acquire subscribers to your email lists. That must be the main target of your investment. It is the one statistic that is vital.
