Have you recently decided to create a newsletter for your business? That’s a very smart decision. In 2022, email newsletters are particularly effective as a marketing method. To be exact, more than 30% of marketers believe that email newsletters are the best way to generate and protect leads today.
Although newsletters are perfect for B2B and SaaS companies, their impact is not limited to that. With an ROI of up to 3800%, email marketing is a budget-friendly approach for both B2B and B2C companies.
But for your marketing newsletter to be a vessel that brings you closer to success, you need to be methodical and keep certain things in mind. That’s why, in this guide, we are going to look at the top 5 tips you should follow if you want to improve the performance of your marketing newsletter.
Improve your Newsletter Performance: 5 Must-Follow Tips
No matter what type of email marketing campaign you opt for, the process is more or less similar. And there are many tips you can follow to make your campaign even more effective in attracting new prospects and building strong relationships with your existing customers.
However, the following 5 tips prove to be the most important in 2022. From optimizing your content to personalizing and automating the newsletter generation process, nothing will be left out:
1. Approaching Key Decision Makers With Valuable Content
Newsletters are one of the best ways to build deeper relationships and share your expertise with key decision-makers at relevant companies. The first thing you need to do is optimize your email lists. You should always have a comprehensive list of your subscribers and prospects.
Keep in mind that your list should not only include the emails of your existing and potential customers. Information such as the job position, full name, and social media accounts will be very useful when you start personalizing and automating the process. But the most important thing with newsletters is the content.
Your newsletters should not be just a pushy promotion of your products or services. Most professionals believe in a 60/40 ratio for newsletter content. 60% of your newsletter should always be valuable content that informs your readers about your niche. And only 40% (or less) should be advertising your services.
Remember that your subscribers follow your brand not only to learn about your new products but also because they are genuinely interested in your industry. This approach is directly influenced by our next tip: hyper-personalization.
2. Personalizing and Warming Up Your Newsletter
Email marketing, in general, used to be one of the most ‘cold,’ impersonal marketing approaches. But this isn’t (or better shouldn’t be) the case anymore. You don’t want your newsletters to come up as a series of bulk messages that your clients aren’t interested in. This is why personalizing your emails is always one of the most effective B2B and SaaS marketing strategies.
To be precise, your newsletters should always have the following elements:
- Refer to the subscriber in person (using their full name) and ensure it’s spelt correctly.
- Be personalized throughout the content and accommodate your client’s needs, values, and preferences.
- Contact the key decision-makers and not their businesses.
This applies to your marketing newsletter strategies as well as your cold email outreach. Think of personalization as an independent marketing strategy that will make your newsletter more successful.
At this point, we have to say that hyper-personalizing a newsletter is not easy. Yet the more you personalize your strategies, the better the results will be. Nowadays, you have access to pretty much all the information you will ever need to personalize your newsletters.
3. Planning is Key
Now that you have all the information you need to personalize the content of your newsletters, it is time to plan the entire process. The process suddenly becomes much easier when you have a clear plan of all the elements you need to include. In a few words, a comprehensive newsletter should always include the following:
- A personalized subject line: The subject line of your marketing newsletter is the first thing your readers will see. This is why it is very important. The subject line will either encourage or discourage the user to open your newsletter. So make sure it is optimized for your subscribers and includes some basic information about the content of your latest newsletter.
- A Preview: That’s the text you will be adding under the subject line to let your readers know what the newsletter is all about.
- Content and mobile-friendly design: Your content should be readable, and the design of the newsletter should be optimized for mobile devices. Don’t forget that more than 40% of all emails are accessed by mobile devices. There are multiple free premade templates online that you can use to create a hyper-personalized marketing newsletter.
4. Automating the Process Will Save you Time and Money
From collecting and verifying a prospect’s email address to organizing your written and visual content for SEO, nothing is left out from the automation process. Although there are multiple ways to automate your email marketing campaigns, all of them have one common element: Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In 2021, AI provides the best ways to automate your marketing newsletters. First of all, you now have the chance to create AMP emails that usually perform better than a traditional HTML email. This allows you to quickly create surveys, feedback forms, registration forms, and calendars.
At the same time, there are many pre-made email newsletter templates that will also help you automate the process. Software like Moosend and Stripo help you improve the performance of your newsletters by providing you with top-notch email editors, data analytics, and much more.
Such tools will ultimately be the way to save both time and money during (and after) your marketing newsletter campaign. But email marketing is all about valuation and adjustments. And this is what brings us to our final tip.
5. Metrics Matter: How A/B Testing Can Help
After creating your first personalized newsletters, it is time to monitor and adjust their performance. There are many measurement and analysis tools that you can use to check the open and bounce rates of your newsletters.
In this context, A/B testing is also very effective. If you are unfamiliar with the term, let us explain: A/B testing is a single process where you test multiple templates until you find the one that works best for your business.
By testing the performance of your newsletters, you can ensure that you are creating top-notch content that will increase your conversion rates. Don’t forget that key decision-makers and subscribers in general probably receive a lot of emails and do not have the time to read them all carefully.
Therefore, do not get discouraged if your first attempts do not meet your goals. Marketing newsletters are very effective in the long run, but they require some effort when it comes to optimizing and automating the process.
Wrap Up
If there’s one thing you should keep in mind from our tips below, it’s the importance of hyper-personalization in marketing newsletters. In fact, there is no better way to improve your email marketing performance than to personalize the subject line and content of your newsletters.
Once you have done this, automating the process will be much easier. If you prioritize the relationship with your subscribers and the quality of your content, you will always be better than your competitors. So all you need to do is add value to your email newsletters, plan ahead and evaluate your efforts regularly.
