What is a newsletter?
What is a newsletter?-Overview
A newsletter is, without a doubt, one of the best investments you can make in digital marketing, yesterday, today and forever.
In an environment where everything seems to change constantly, email marketing continues to be a safe bet due to its low cost and high profitability. Over the years this tool has expanded its technical possibilities, but its basic "ingredients" remain the same, and one of them is the newsletter . Therefore, I want to tell you some key definitions on this topic, what are its benefits and how to create yours step by step from scratch. We started!
Definitions: what exactly is a newsletter?
To start, let's clarify a few related concepts: email marketing, mailing lists, newsletters, and emailing:
Email marketing
The email marketing is the technique that involves contacting businesses and their customers (current or potential) via email. Within this technique, we can find many types of strategies and different messages, from emails to communicate the news of the company to the most promotional.
Mailing list
A mailing list is made up of a set of users who have voluntarily left us their email to receive email communications. This database, therefore, is the recipient of the different email marketing campaigns.
It is very important to bear in mind that, under the RGPD (New Data Protection Regulation) , we can only include in our mailing lists users who have specifically indicated their consent and only for the specific purpose for which they have granted it. Among other things, this means that we can no longer use the strategy of including pre-checked boxes in forms.
Newsletter
A newsletter or bulletin is a digital publication with a certain periodicity (from daily to quarterly) that is sent to the users of a mailing list. Within an email marketing strategy , newsletters have a fundamentally informative function , that is, they are composed mainly of news and content of interest to users. They can also include an offer or call to action, but information should always predominate.
Mailing
Although they are sometimes confused with newsletters , mailings have a totally different role in email marketing .
A mailing is an advertising email message , which promotes the products and services of a brand. Instead of being sent to your own mailing list, mailings are often sent to large third-party databases.
Report: Email Marketing Recruitment 2021
Benefits of creating your own newsletter
Deliverability .
When we campaign on social networks like Facebook, their algorithms determine which users they reach and which they don't, and marketers cannot control this aspect. However, you know that your newsletter will reach all the users on your mailing list.
Own databases .
With email marketing, you are the sole owner of the data of the users who join the mailing list, and you can export it between different tools. Again, this is an advantage over social networks, where users are lost if a network closes.
Filtered .
Newsletters are a super effective tool to know who are the users who are really interested in you. After all, if they voluntarily leave you their data, it is because they want to know more about your brand.
Free of penalties .
The level of traffic on your website is subject to changes in search engine algorithms such as Google, which can cause its positioning to drop from one day to the next. Instead, your subscribers will always be there.
Free market research .
Thanks to newsletters, you can get a lot of information about your audience, both through responses to forms and A / B tests and other experiments.
Customization .
An email is essentially a "blank canvas" that you can fill with all kinds of content, and the options for personalization and interaction continue to grow. From there, you can use your creativity to design highly personalized messages and adapt to different users.
Loyalty .
Sending regular communications allows you to stay in touch with your audience and create long-term relationships.
Content curation .
Newsletters are an excellent way to reuse content from your website and your blog and give them a second life, either as part of the emails themselves or by creating compilations to offer them as an incentive to subscribe to your mailing list.
Profitability .
Creating an email newsletter doesn't require a huge investment of time or resources, making it affordable for businesses of all sizes.
ROI .
Although the main function of these mailings is to inform and not to sell, they can be a key part of a conversion-oriented email marketing strategy. And thanks to its low cost and high effectiveness, the return on investment is simply incredible: according to Campaign Monitor, it can reach up to 4,300%!
How to launch an effective newsletter step by step
Ready to create your own newsletter from scratch?
Sign up these steps!
1) Define your goals and analyze the situation
Always, always, whenever we launch a marketing action, we have to think about what we want to achieve with it. This objective will be behind everything we do, from the incentives that we use for users to subscribe to the periodicity of the newsletter. Therefore, it is your turn to reflect on what you want to achieve with your email marketing and how it fits into your more general marketing strategy .
If you start from scratch, you can set goals based on the traffic you are receiving on your website, estimating the percentage of users you hope to convince to subscribe to your newsletter.
It can also be very useful to see what the competition is doing and even subscribe to their newsletters for a few weeks to analyze what kind of messages they send.
2) Build your mailing list
If you want to launch a newsletter, it is clear that the first thing is to have someone to send it to. So in this step you need to think about what your recruitment strategy is going to be .
The essential thing is to place a banner or subscription widget on your website or blog, so that it is clearly visible. The copy has to make it very clear what the benefits of subscribing are. Normally, the user will have to fill in a small form that will provide us with information about him.
As an additional incentive, many brands resort to " lead magnets ", that is, they offer an incentive (generally in the form of downloadable content) in exchange for the user leaving their email. This content has to have great value for the user, but that does not mean that it has to be very extensive or that it requires a large investment in working hours. For starters, you can try simple content like a template, a checklist, or a list of helpful resources on a specific topic.
Once you have a viable minimum number of subscribers, you will have to sit down to analyze the information in the form and see what your user base is like. It is also the time to segment the audience on different mailing lists based on their preferences.
3) Plan your strategy
These are some of the basic aspects that you need to have defined before jumping into the pool:
The contents of your newsletter.
For example, the latest blog posts or industry news. What are you going to do to add additional value to your users? How will you get it to reflect the tone and values of your brand?
The frequency of shipment.
There are no hard and fast rules, but you will have to find a balance between not letting your subscribers forget about you and avoiding overwhelming them with too many emails.
The sequence of messages.
Depending on the segments that you have previously defined, you will have to design "paths" that correspond to the interests of different users. For example, you can create a regular content series on a topic, like "tip of the week".
The design .
As you already know, it is essential that it adapts to different screen sizes and is clear and easy to read. If you are going to include images or interactive elements, always have an "option B" handy for users who cannot view them.
4) Send your newsletter
You are now ready for your first shipment! As your mailing list grows, you will need an automated process to make your task easier. Luckily, there are a lot of email marketing tools on the market and many of them are free up to X number of shipments, such as MailChimp or MailRelay.
5) Measure the results
Finally, no marketing action is complete without analyzing what has happened and using this information to continue improving. Look at metrics such as open and click rates, mailing list ups and downs, and A / B test and experiment results to keep improving your newsletter every day.
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