Email marketing continues to be a vital strategy for small, medium-sized and large businesses across nearly all verticals, including both B2C and B2B brands.
However, there’s a lot more to creating an e-newsletter than writing up some content, uploading it to your template and hitting “submit.” You need to take the time to develop a detailed strategy to ensure your email marketing campaign is actually providing you with a measurable return on investment.
Related: Save Your Email Marketing from the Trash Folder
Here are some tips to help ensure your email newsletters are useful and contain content your target audience actually wants to read:
- Choose a variety of major topics: These should be topics your customers are interested in and at the top of their list of priorities. Try to pick topics that are timely and getting a lot of traction on social media and around the web, and dedicate up to a few paragraphs to each of these topics to engage your readers.
- Find out what your readers want to hear: See what your target audience is discussing on social media, or even ask your readers what information they find most interesting or useful. You’re catering these e-newsletters to them, after all, so having their input certainly couldn’t hurt as you develop your strategy.
- Add some sidebar topics to discuss: These generally include small pieces of easily digestible information, such as quick tips, interesting statistics, upcoming events, a brief interview, suggested reading or any special deals you have to offer. It adds some extra, useful information to your newsletter without distracting from the real “meat” of your content.
- Add media: Photos or videos can add substantial value to e-newsletter content when used wisely. Audio recordings of interviews with experts, special brand videos and photo promotions of deals or new products are all examples of media you may choose to include in your message.
- Make sure you proofread: The hard work you put in to choosing your topics, designing the newsletter layout and actually developing the content could be undone by a few simple, preventable errors that reflect poorly on your company. Make sure you take some time to go back and proofread what you’ve written and make any revisions necessary.
For an email marketing campaign to be successful, it takes time and persistence. Many companies have turned to third-party copywriting service providers for help, as these firms and their talented writers and editors know how to develop high-impact e-newsletter content tailored to your industry and target audience.