When a client/customer gives you their email address they are inviting you to interact with them on a more personal level. It is your opportunity to build an important relationship with past, present, future and perspective customers. Don’t waste their time. Make sure that every email you send, especially the newsletters gives them a reason to open the email and not click the “unsubscribe” button.
Email marketing needs to be done correctly. Email newsletters need to contain content that is valuable and useful to your list. Here are 5 tips on creating relevant content for your email newsletter.
1. Ask – Probably one of the single most effective ways to provide content your list is looking for is to ask them what they need. There are a number of ways you can go about asking, such as through your social network pages, surveys, your blog or by carefully reading through emails your subscribers have sent you. Things you are looking for:
- Problems in need of resolution
- Complaints
- Questions more than one person has asked
2. Data Leverage – Email marketing is data driven, so take a look back through your other email newsletter stats to see what worked before. What type of content generated the most opens or clicks or responses and create similar content or provide content in the same manner. Today images and videos are huge, the click rate is incredible because these forms of media interact with the reader and provides an experience for them.
3. Social Mentions – Stay on top of what is happening in your industry by taking a look at trending topics on Google Hot Trends and Bing. Follow some of your competitors on the social networks and see what they are talking about, addressing or not addressing that their followers are talking about. Your email newsletter is the ideal format to reach your clients and their friends, because chances are that if one person on your list is liking or having an issue with a topic, then someone else is also. This makes your content shareable and possibly viral helping to attract new prospects.
4. Crowd-sourced Topic Suggestions – just as there are email newsletter services and email newsletter software there are also now services, such as TextBroker, that offer customers the chance to get topic suggestions to the community of writers on TextBroker. There is a nominal fee associated with that service but it provides you with a story ideas and headlines.
5.Content Optimization Tools – There are also services available to you that will help determine what it is your email subscribers are looking for. These services will give you keywords and phrases that your target audience is looking for in real time. A valuable service that can really help you create engaging content that will emphasize your email marketing prowess.
Creating compelling and highly effective email newsletters can be challenging, yet fun. The tips we have provided though will help you create newsletters that your subscribers will want to read and want to share. Generating truly awesome results 🙂