Your Newsletter of the Future, Now

By Ardath Albee. Abridged and reprinted with permission from her blog Marketing Interactions.

Newsletters delivered via email are a staple for many B2B companies. These e-newsletters usually contain titles, descriptions, and links to several articles, perhaps an executive column, a customer spotlight, an invitation to a webinar or a white paper download, and any product or company news at hand.

The problem I see with many company newsletters is that they’re instantly forgettable. My brain goes to “blah, blah, blah” when I see them in the preview pane of my inbox.

What may be keeping your newsletters from performing is the lack of strategy applied in their assembly. That usually occurs because the goal for your newsletter is about your company keeping its name in front of customers rather than providing value and relevance to subscribers.

Your newsletter needs a goal.

Start small and set one goal for existing customers and one for prospects. Based on the goal(s), plan your content layout around one thing you want to learn. You shouldn’t ever send a single marketing communication without the goal of learning something.

Newsletters can be a great opportunity to:

• Float new ideas to gauge interest. For instance, run an article about solving a problem of concern to your customers and measure time spent by readers who clicked through. Say it’s 22 seconds, but you know it really takes at least 60 seconds to absorb the idea. Bank it until later, or rethink it altogether.
• See what gets the most attention. Measure the clicks for each article. If readers represent a nice mix between prospects and customers, and time spent is high enough to show true interest, this may reveal an opportunity both to sell more to existing customers and to nurture new prospects.
• Examine the readership of every story. A story may not attract many readers, but when you look deeper, you may see that four people from the same company all viewed it. That should trigger a follow-up call. Maybe the story was about a company just like theirs. At the very least, you know exactly how to start the conversation.

Beyond open and click-through

The problem with focusing on just the basic statistics is that you’re only scratching the surface on an aggregate level. Let’s say you achieve a 40 percent open rate and a 15 percent click-through. In comparison to other emails, this may seem like a great outcome…but is it? You’ll never know if you don’t dig deeper and measure your statistics against specific goals.

Ardath Albee is CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist for Marketing Interactions, Inc..