Digital marketing is challenging. I’ve been doing it for over a decade, and I know that sometimes it feels like a thankless task that locks you into a ceaseless grind of creating content and promoting it to an unblinking, unyielding digital void of slack-jawed scroll zombies.
Whoa. That went a little dark there.
All I’m saying is that sometimes you create content, and you’re not sure that it’s making an impact. And sometimes, you’re right: it’s not.
Email marketing tips: Remember the ultimate goal of digital marketing
We’ll explore tips below to help you smarten up your email newsletter content and keep it fresh and engaging for your readers.
But as you’re reading the tips, I want you to keep the ultimate goal of digital marketing in mind.
The ultimate goal of digital marketing is not expanding sales or growing leads. Those things will hopefully happen as a result of meeting your ultimate goal, but they are not the goal itself.
The ultimate goal of digital marketing is: Make genuine, lasting connections with your audience.
So with that goal in mind, let’s look at ways of meeting it with your email newsletter content.
Check your email newsletter stats
To establish a baseline of who is interacting with your email newsletter and how much time they spend with it, explore the stats from your last several (ten to twelve ) newsletters.
Draw up a chart that tracks your:
- Clickthrough Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Bounce Rate
- List Growth Rate
- Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
- Overall ROI
- Open Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
(If these numbers are new to you, Hubspot provides a thorough explanation here.)
A solid understanding of your engagement baseline establishes a measured starting place for measurable improvement.
But don’t stop with a baseline. Continue to track these numbers monthly so you can measure whether your email newsletter improvements are meeting your goals.
Diversify your content with thought-leading industry blogs
Suppose your email newsletter recipients open your newsletter but don’t read for long. In that case, they may be interested in learning more about your industry or company but find your newsletter content stale.
Creating good content takes time, and you probably don’t have a lot of that to spare. But no rule says you can’t include other companies’ blogs in your email newsletter, as long as you give them credit. They will appreciate the backlink as it improves their SEO ranking.
As you’re reading relevant industry articles, consider whether your newsletter audience may like them, too.
Include any article or blog that contains essential or interesting information for your readers. Link to the third-party blog and make it clear that this content was copied from a third party.
Update your blog content regularly
Updating your blog with posts monthly (or preferably weekly!) greatly benefits your digital marketing efforts.
For starters, regularly posting fresh, relevant information on your website improves your search ranking and is part of a clever SEO strategy.
But regular blog posts ensure you always have new content for your newsletter. And you can use blog posts as social media content, either by promoting the entire blog or taking snippets from the blog and making them infographics or memes.
Answer customer questions in your newsletter
Customer questions are an often-overlooked but handy source of inspiration for marketing content.
Customer questions offer insight into the problems customers want your product/service to solve for them. They give you honest feedback on frustrations and genuine language on how customers view their pain points.
You can harness that feedback and language to write blogs, social media content, and/or newsletter content that addresses authentic customer problems and demonstrates how your product/service is the solution.
Write a blog based on a customer question which can then be included in a newsletter or feature a Q&A section. Either way, use the subject of the blog/Q&A section as your email subject line, and you’re sure to get a high open and click-through rate.
Include upcoming events in your newsletter
Adding upcoming events to a newsletter is standard, but small companies may not have many (or any) events to promote. In that case, industry events also have a place in your newsletter.
Including upcoming industry events shows readers that you are in the know about what’s happening in your industry. It also encourages them to consider your company as an industry information source.
Remember that upcoming sales can and should be considered “events,” and your newsletter is an appropriate place to promote them.
Always include a CTA at the end
The cherry on top of your email newsletter sundae is a call to action or CTA. A simple CTA at the end of a newsletter invites readers to keep the conversation going.
It could be an invitation to receive blog updates, follow your brand on social media channels, or book a call/visit with your business.
Whatever it promotes, a CTA offers readers an avenue to deeper involvement with your brand, thus achieving the ultimate goal of digital marketing as described above.
If you want help crafting engaging email newsletter copy, contact us. Our founder and head content strategist Abby is happy to chat with you about your email marketing strategy and how purposeful, well-crafted copy supports it.
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