Set Up Your Newsletter Strategy With Our Full Guide

Newsletter strategy is a critical part of ensuring that your newsletter content reaches the right parties and is tailored to them. Your open and click-through rates will be higher, you’ll better engage with your readers, and you’ll further build their loyalty. How do you create a newsletter strategy?

Producing a winning newsletter strategy is a two-pronged approach that includes how you’ll produce newsletter content and then promote that content using marketing. Segment your audience, determine goals, write rich content, and split-test before you hit the send button.

In today’s guide, we’ll first go over the facets of newsletter content strategy before we delve into a full-fledged marketing strategy. Keep reading for actionable tips and more.

Newsletter Content Strategy – How to Captivate Your Audience

According to a 2020 report from Content Marketing Institute, more than 80 percent of marketers rely on email newsletters as their primary form of content marketing.

If you’re the same, then having a newsletter strategy for producing content is integral.

Through this strategy, you can ensure your content is meeting performance benchmarks so it will connect better with your audience and perform optimally.

Here are the pillars of your newsletter content strategy.

Integrate Your Newsletter into Your Content Marketing Strategy

While newsletters should indeed be a viable part of your content marketing strategy, they should not comprise the entirety of that strategy.

Your company should also regularly produce blog content, video storytelling, whitepapers, emails, social media posts, podcasts, and the like.

Your newsletter content should slot into this existing content, not dominate or out-edge any of it.

This way, you can be confident that yours is a whole content marketing strategy that isn’t focusing too much on any one area, such as email.

Create Content Guidelines for Your Brand

Unless you designate the responsibility to just one person, then it’s unlikely that producing your newsletter will fall on the same shoulders each and every time.

The job may shift among different people within your company.

Since the email newsletter content production role will change hands, it’s critical that you establish content guidelines to ensure consistency from one newsletter to another.

According to the brand-templating platform Marq’s State of Brand Consistency report, keeping branding consistent can boost a company’s revenue between 10 and 20 percent.

Guidelines will guarantee that consistency so customers can rely on the newsletter content you produce and come to look forward to it.

Stay Informative

What is the point of a newsletter? Is it to educate? Entertain?

It’s a little bit of both, actually.

That said, it’s critical that you don’t fall too far into the entertainment sphere and forget about what a newsletter should be, which is informative.

Whether you’re informing your readers of new additions to your team, new products or service, or an upcoming sale, providing valuable information they can’t find anywhere else is why your audience reads your newsletter.

Define a Goal for Each Newsletter

Part of your newsletter strategy, especially for the writing portion, should be having a clear-cut goal in mind.

Why are you producing this newsletter? The answer shouldn’t solely be because it’s that time of the year, but because you have something to share with your audience.

Once you can identify goals, it becomes a lot easier to put together the skeleton of your newsletter and then flesh it out from there.

Integrate CTAs into the Content

Newsletters needn’t only be entertaining and informative but can serve as valuable promotional opportunities as well.

Make sure to utilize CTA buttons and links throughout the content.

For example, if you’re talking about a current product, you might add a CTA that redirects the reader to that product’s landing page.

Be clear about where your CTAs and links are redirecting customers.

Create a Content Calendar

How often will you publish a newsletter?

That’s for your company to decide, but evidence suggests that more frequency is better.

Email marketing resource Campaign Monitor states that 61 percent of today’s consumers prefer weekly emails from the brands they follow.

Whether you issue weekly newsletters or more seldom than that, a content calendar is a valuable tool.

You’ll know what the newsletter content will be and when it will go out so there’s always something new for customers to read.

Create Personalized Content

Part of your newsletter strategy must be personalizing content.

The best way to do that is through a strategy that we’ll suggest in the next section, and that’s segmenting your audience.

Then you can produce various versions of the newsletter for different audience groups.

Newsletter Marketing Strategy – How to Promote Your Content

Now let’s switch gears and talk about the next element of your newsletter marketing strategy, and that’s promoting your content.

Once you’ve gotten several newsletters in the pipeline and ready to go out, here’s how to maximize your marketing.

Set Goals

Just as you set goals when producing a newsletter, you need to determine goals regarding how you’ll promote the newsletter as well.

Which marketing channels do you intend to utilize? What kind of open rate and click-through rates are you planning for?

These questions all need answering.

Choose Your Newsletter Tool

Today, there exists no shortage of email and newsletter tools. You have so many options at your fingertips that you can feel a little overwhelmed.

We recommend focusing on a series of factors when it comes to selecting the right tool for you, including cost, features, and ease of use.

Grow Your Email List

While segmenting your audience is an important newsletter strategy, you don’t want to send emails to groups so small that it’s not worth the time, effort, or expense.

Growing your email list will give you a more receptive audience.

You don’t necessarily have to chew deeply into your marketing budget to increase the size of your email list. Try these tricks and strategies instead:

• Get interactive with quizzes
• Answer questions on Quora, Facebook Groups, and forums
• Host a contest or giveaway
• Write guest posts
• Work with an influencer
• Advertise, including native ads online as well as social media ads
• Include an email signup button on your Facebook profile
• Add a CTA to your email signature that links to the email opt-in page

Segment Your Audience

As we’ve alluded to already, segmenting your audience is a critical piece of your overall newsletter strategy.

According to email marketing resource NotifyVisitors, companies that segmented their email audiences generated 101 percent more clicks and open rates at an elevated 14.31 percent.

Segmenting your audience requires you to divide them by criteria such as demographics (age, occupation, gender, income, marital status, etc.), geography, and psychographics (opinions, motivations, etc.).

As we talked about in the section prior, you’d then tailor the content that goes out to these audience segments so they’re reading about the facets of your company that are the most engaging and interesting to them.

Use Email Templates

Producing a newsletter is far from your only responsibility, so any opportunity you have to make it easier on yourself is one that you should take advantage of.

The same newsletter tool you purchased per our recommendation before should offer a wealth of email templates for you to select from.

While we wouldn’t recommend taking one of these templates and using it verbatim, so to speak, you can often modify and otherwise customize the template so it’s a little less cookie-cutter.

You’ll still have a reliable template base to work from that you didn’t build from scratch, but it will look professional and engaging to your audience.

Optimize for Mobile

How often do you read emails from your phone or mobile device? Probably daily, right?

CRM service SuperOffice reports that more than 80 percent of today’s consumers will open and read emails on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.

When your emails aren’t mobile-optimized, you can trust that your consumers will quickly realize that and then trash your emails. Worse yet, they might even unsubscribe.

Only send newsletter content that’s mobile-optimized.

Write Catchy Subject Lines

What makes a good subject line? Well, it has to be catchy, although what a catchy subject line is will vary among your audience segments.

For some, the use of an emoji or two peppered in ever so sparingly might grab their attention.

Perhaps you generate a sense of FOMO (the fear of missing out) or try to otherwise generate an emotional reaction.

Even though the email content you’re sending (i.e., your newsletter) is exceptionally valuable, you still can’t forego a good subject line to entice your readers to click and open.

A/B Test

Should you use this font or that one? Is this subject line better or the other one? Maybe this color choice looked better than that.

Rather than agonize over these questions yourself, rely on A/B testing within your newsletter tool.

Split testing will help you better optimize your newsletter content for audience receptivity, a must as part of your newsletter strategy.

Track Your Performance

Gauging whether your email newsletter was a success is as easy as reviewing open and click-through rates as well as website and social media traffic.

If your company doesn’t yet have the tools in place to do this, then prioritize that first.

Without knowing how your emails are performing, you can fall into traps like sending emails too frequently or too seldom or mailing content that your audience doesn’t connect with.

Conclusion

Developing a newsletter strategy can help your company harness the power of email, send more meaningful content to your various audience segments, build trust and engagement, convert more customers, boost your email open rates, and ultimately, generate more sales.

With these tips, you’re ready to launch a winning newsletter! For further information, contact now Mediaboom