With social media taking center stage in most modern content marketing strategies, some marketers have forgotten their old and trusted friend, the email newsletter. Don’t let this valuable resource be overshadowed by an increasingly demanding marketing retinue. Here are some sound reasons why an email newsletter should be part of your online marketing campaign.
What’s up?
A email newsletter can take a look back at the week, month or quarter to remind your readers of the highlights from your content marketing and blogs. You can refresh their memories about the new products or services that you now have to offer. Your newsletter is a way of staying in touch with your client base and keeping on their minds.
Your newsletter can utilize content you have already created for your blog and other aspects of your content marketing strategy so you don’t have to create unique content here. As your engaging content draws readers in, you will find more click throughs to your site and this will help to improve your SEO.
A study by Jeff Rohrs from Exact Target: “66 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a result of a marketing message received via email…” Newsletters also make it easy to make purchases as users can click through to your ecommerce store from your newsletter. This is also a great way to disseminate information about upcoming sales or offer coupons and discounts.
Better than Facebook and Twitter
You can reach a mobile market too. 79% of users utilize their smartphones for reading email. Jakob Neilson from the Nielson Norman Group has conducted a number of studies to measure the efficacy of newsletters and finds that they are an even more powerful tool than Facebook and Twitter if done right: “Email newsletters remain the Internet’s best tool for supplementing a website,” says Nielson. One of the reasons for this is that the newsletter will sit in the user’s inbox until they do something with it, unlike Facebook and Twitter posts which just get buried in the newsfeed.
If your subject line is enticing enough, most users won’t be able to resist a peek when their day slows down. Once you have them opening the newsletter, they are invested enough to take a look at your content.
Gmail’s new tabs
One caveat to the success of your newsletter campaign is the new ‘tabs’ system from Gmail. Email template creator MailChimp has done extensive studies on the effect the new Gmail tabs system has on email click throughs and found that fewer emails and newsletters were opened when they ended up in the ‘promotions’ tab. Gmail has been particularly crafty about setting up the tabs and the only way to ensure that your newsletters end up in the Primary tab rather than the Promotions tab is to ask your subscribers to move your newsletters there. Instructions can be found here.
With alluring headlines and interesting content, you will be able to really capitalize from the cache of newsletters. Ensure that your newsletters are optimized for mobile devices and take advantage of this enduring marketing tool.
