There are many parts to a content marketing strategy. One of the most important parts is an email newsletter. Despite many cries to the contrary, email is not dead as a marketing tool. In fact, email remains the most effective digital marketing tool, in spite of the meteoric rise of the most popular social media platforms. Your customers may or may not check their social media accounts during the day, but business email remains the go-to choice for communication.
Knowing and understanding that fact, you may be considering producing a regular email newsletter for your customers, users, sales channel, or other audience segments. Before you get anywhere, you must remember that an email newsletter is an integral part of your content marketing strategy, so the goals of the newsletter should support the goals of the content marketing strategy.
Here is a straightforward 8-point plan to beginning your email newsletter.
Please, do not try to operate an email newsletter with GMail. There are hundreds of email service providers to choose from. However, since you are just starting off, my advice is to find one that has a freemium option, meaning you don’t pay for a certain limited number of subscribers. Mailchimp is one such provider: emailing even daily to up to 2,000 subscribers is free. I use Mailchimp to manage all aspects of the Atlanta Tech Blogs daily digest email.
- who is your target audience?
- what content will you share in the newsletter?
- where will you promote your newsletter?
- when will you send each issue out?
- why are you creating a newsletter (what are your goals)?
Gather content from all of your available sources— including your blog, social media channels, company news, customer and employee testimonials, video training, customer support, and product/service documentation. Remember, you’re creating a vehicle to share content, so you need to make sure you have a lot of content to tap into for each newsletter issue.
For this piece, I mean to put it on paper with a plan for each of the following:
- frequency
- format (template)
- types of content
- amount of content
- calls to action
- opt-in tactics
Promote your newsletter on every page of your website, email signatures, social media channels, your blog, and every other digital marketing channel you employ. Most of all, to promote your newsletter, offer something of value to your would-be subscribers.
- double opt-in – when a subscriber enters their email address, they should receive an email confirmation that they must click on to confirm that they did opt-in to subscribe.
- easy opt out – make it very simple if someone no longer wants to subscribe to your newsletter. Don’t take it personally, just let them out.
- “you’re receiving this email because” – include the simple reminder in the footer of your email newsletter template that reminds the subscriber why they’re receiving the email.
- datavalidation offers a free service to check your email list against spam reports.
- offer an alternate contact method such as a phone number or your social media account
- respond to email inquiries from your newsletter
All ESPs offer measurement and analytics tools, so you can easily track your most common metrics:
- Open & read
- Click rate
- Subscriber growth
- Unsubscribes
- Spam reports
Just like you should do with your blog or any other aspect of your content marketing strategy, you should constantly measure the results of your email newsletter against your goals, and change what’s not working.
If you walk through these eight steps in the creation of your email newsletter, you’ll be starting off on the right foot. Content is king, and email is still the killer app of content marketing.
Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.
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