Email marketing can be a great way to boost traffic to your website and to guide your subscribers further down the sales funnel, whether they’ve bought something from you before or not. Knowing what marketing works and what doesn’t when it comes to newsletters is helpful.
In this guide, you’ll learn about how beneficial newsletter marketing can be for your startup as well as six useful tips to help ensure your email marketing is as effective as it can be.
Why is newsletter marketing important?
Email marketing can provide an opportunity to build more personable relationships with your customers whilst hopefully converting more leads to paying customers. As 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, it’s worth it for any startup to bring their attention to this form of marketing.
As a startup, funds may be limited and email marketing is an affordable way to reach your subscribers. By building relationships, you’re likely to acquire more of a loyal following. This is critical for startups to have if they want to make it past that one-year mark.
Newsletter marketing can be a flexible approach when it comes to trying out different ideas or campaigns that you have in mind for the business. It’s a form of communication that most of us can access daily. In fact, 99% of email users will check their inbox every day, sometimes up to twenty times a day.
If done right, newsletter marketing can be one of the most impactful marketing channels to help your business go further.
Six newsletter marketing tips
So where do you start when it comes to creating newsletters for your startup? When it comes to email marketing, a lot of the tips below can relate to general email marketing. Newsletters inform and update the email subscribers on the latest news and information that the company has to share.
The following tips should provide you with the guidance you need to create the best newsletter marketing materials for your customers and potential leads.
1. Acquire strong email subscribers
In order for your newsletters to be effective, they need to reach email subscribers who will benefit from them. It’s important to aim for quality over quantity in all areas of email marketing.
A great newsletter is one that’s engaging for its readers, so the first step is making sure you have the right email subscribers. If not, then it may be beneficial to find ways of acquiring new subscribers. For example, you can include sign-up box on your website that offers a discount on your products or services.
Knowing who your audience is is also important, so consider analytical platforms that assess who is already engaging with your business. Whether it’s on your website or your social media feeds, the right email subscribers are key to your newsletters getting the engagement they deserve.
2. Make it educational and engaging
Newsletter marketing is only as good as the copy you write within the emails themselves. The content should be educational and engaging. They should have the right tone of voice and be visually appealing so that the user doesn’t simply click delete or ignore the email completely.
Since the average email open rate is 17.8%, there’s a high chance already that your newsletter will be dismissed. If you’ve not got the skilled copywriters in-house, then it’s certainly wise to outsource your needs to freelancers or agencies that can help.
Consider your audience again when it comes to the creation of the copy and focus on storytelling in order to take your reader on a journey. They will likely stay more engaged with the content if you’ve thought about the intent and delivery of the newsletter.
There are plenty of platforms and tools to utilize in order to create visually stunning newsletters. For example, Flodesk is one that can provide templates for newsletters. Their introduction examples offer great insight for your own email copy.
3. Collaborate with others
Collaboration is an important part of business and the same can be said when it comes to newsletter marketing. A newsletter is often a collaborative process, so be sure to gather your team members together. This way, you can combine knowledge and skills from experts in different areas in order to create the very best newsletters possible.
Using a shared storage space is useful when you’re brainstorming and collaborating on content. Many are using cloud storage such as Google Drive to do this because it’s accessible both online and offline, wherever you or your team are.
There are plenty of other tools that you might want to look into when it comes to creating visually engaging newsletters. Canva is a good one for all types of digital designing and editing. It doesn’t take someone a degree in design to understand how to use Canva – anyone can use the platform.
4. Consider including any CTAs
With newsletter marketing, one of your intentions might be to encourage your readers to do something. This might be entering a competition, signing a petition, or shopping for a seasonal sale on your eCommerce website. A call-to-action (CTA) encourages an action that can provide further interaction from your email subscribers.
Emails that have just a single call-to-action included in it, see increased clicks of 371% and sales of 1617% – now those are hefty percentage increases, right?
Think about some of your objectives and goals as a startup and consider how you could implement these CTAs within your newsletters. It can be a great way to help influence response or interaction with your business that they might not have done so without it.
5. Create a regular routine
For successful content of any type, consistency is key. In order to keep your startup in that potential lead’s mind, you want to be landing in their mailbox regularly. A regular routine, whether it’s a weekly newsletter, monthly, or twice-monthly is going to help build up a community of readers that await your emails.
Even though this might be challenging to keep up with small businesses and startups, it’s made easier through automation. It means you and your team can create the newsletter ahead of time and schedule it for sending to your email subscribers whenever you want them to receive it.
There are plenty of these automation platforms available and one of the more popular platforms to use is Flodesk. Not only can you create the templates for your newsletters on here but you can also ensure your email subscribers are receiving your content in a timely manner.
6. Monitor and assess the efficiency
And finally, analysis can be great for your marketing efforts. When it comes to sending out your newsletters, it’s good to monitor and assess each one’s efficiency. Whether it’s the number of opens it receives or click-throughs where you’ve incorporated links.
Your newsletters are only going to be as successful as you’d like them to be by getting the formula right. For some email subscribers, you may notice less engagement and on other newsletters, more engagement. Spotting any distinguishing changes or features of email newsletters that have been more successful will help you get the right mix for future emails.
Many of the platforms, like Flodesk, will also provide you with the necessary data to make any changes that are needed to improve your marketing.
The benefits from email marketing
There are many benefits that can come with email marketing for your startup. Every little promotion can help boost your company’s presence online and that includes regular emails sent to your mailing list.
Low costs
Most email marketing tools are free to use and so they can reduce the overall costs that a startup can face when running their organization. If you can maintain fewer expenditures in those initial few months to a year, this can help provide more stability for the future.
Helps build a community
Email marketing is a personable way of communicating with your customers and those leads who might be closer to converting into a sale. With regular newsletters, you can help build a community of followers that are loyal to your brand. In this modern-day where competition is rife, it’s important to have those core followers that’ll continually push your business into the spotlight.
Directly delivers the message
With newsletters, they provide a platform for your startup to get across an important message to your users. Whether it’s to boost customer sales or to provide upcoming news about the brand and where it’s going or what it’s up to currently, this all adds to a more personable relationship with your customers.
Utilize newsletter marketing for your business
When it comes to your business marketing, newsletters and email, in general, are great ways to communicate with your customers. It’s also a good opportunity to share news and useful information about your brand and regarding the industry you operate in.