Breaking news: it’s 2022 and there are still people who are unconvinced that newsletters can form a valuable part of your marketing mix. Let’s investigate.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know we talk a lot about newsletters. In the past few months alone, we’ve covered what they should contain, how to make email campaigns more effective and even details like how long a newsletter should be. What these topics all have in common is that they are all evidence-based arguments for not just the fact of having a newsletter, but also the specific features they should have.
In fact, email campaigns are among the most measurable forms of marketing you can do. You know exactly what is contained in each piece, precisely when it was sent, what time people read it, which links they follow, how far they scroll down, which site visits from which emails lead to conversions and a whole host of other factors that you can choose to measure or ignore, depending on the nature of the mail and the campaign. And of course, you can also see how many people unsubscribe for each mail you send out.
That means that you’re in a perpetual feedback loop with your campaign. Once you’ve sent out a representative sample of emails (5–10 is probably enough to get started), you can start to use the data that’s fed back to identify your emails’ strongest and weakest points, the turn-ons and the turn-offs, if you like.
Then you can start to focus on the positives and scale back on the negatives (remembering that there’s always a case for including some of the less popular material, just less of it, featured less prominently). After that, the data just keeps on coming, until you have years’ worth of data to craft highly effective campaigns that work in your sector.
And best of all, it’s incredibly cheap. You can set up campaigns with around 1000 subscribers for nothing with a lot of the major providers, and if you’ve got tens of thousands of subscribers, it’s probably worth paying for the extra services anyway. You might need to devote just a few hours a month to it, too, and that could represent a huge ROI.
Our involvement in email campaigns is an important one, too. One of our services is creating HTML email templates that allow you to send out professional looking mailshots that your recipients will instantly recognise as yours. We design them to look perfect on the whole range of devices – phones, tablets, computers – and with the whole range of OS-based or other email clients (e.g. Outlook or Android/Apple email) and web-based email.
Very few businesses that start an email campaign and run it properly end up abandoning it because it quickly proves itself to be an effective and efficient way of promoting your brand and its messages. It’s really quick to set up (we can help with that too) and you can choose how deeply you want to drill down into the data that comes back. It’s such a low-risk way of getting eyeballs on your company, it becomes an obvious channel pretty quickly. And that’s why it’s so important to get up and running.
