6 easy steps to creating a great newsletter content strategy

As a communications platform, email boasts about?four billion?daily users –?more than double?that of Facebook – and that number will grow in the coming years. Email’s personalized appeal and massive user base make leveraging your contact list a great way to drive sales and keep existing customers engaged. And one of the best ways to do this is through a regularly-scheduled newsletter.

Newsletters let you put a personal stamp on your email marketing strategy, providing value and insight to customers. When users sign up for newsletters, they expect to be informed, not sold. To succeed, you’ll need to create a robust newsletter content strategy. Lucky for you, it’s our job here at Aimtal to create great newsletters (among other things) for our B2B clients, and we’ve outlined six steps to make yours a hit.

1. Define Your Newsletter Goals

Keeping specific goals in mind helps inform your decisions about your newsletter’s content, style, and tone. Concrete goals are also crucial to measuring success, which we’ll touch on later.

Think about your overall marketing goals and initiatives, and then decide how a newsletter can help achieve them. For example, If your goal is to increase conversions by 20% for a specific buyer persona this year, think about how you can tailor your newsletter messaging to speak to that specific audience.

First, what can you offer in your newsletter that others can’t — what value will your subscribers receive in exchange for their email address? Second, how will you steer your readers towards the conversion point you’re working to achieve?

To maximize your success, focus on creating?SMART?goals. Increasing conversions by 20% for a specific buyer persona this year is a SMART goal because it’s:

• Specific: you want to increase conversions by 20% this year, not get some new customers.
• Measurable: you can measure the number of new conversions you get, and compare it to numbers from previous years.
• Achievable: Increasing conversions by 20% sounds reasonable and possible, but increasing conversions by 10,000% does not (although, if that happens, you’re definitely doing something right!).
• Relevant: Increasing conversions is pertinent to your marketing goals, but finding out what your customers’ favorite colors are probably isn’t.
• Timely: You want to increase your conversions this year, not at some point.

Once you’ve identified your newsletter goals, it’s time to think about who you’ll be emailing.

2. Research Your Audience

A newsletter can be an excellent marketing tool if you offer relevant insights to your audience — and a huge annoyance if you aren’t. Your email marketing strategy will only succeed if you know your target audience and how you can help, motivate, entertain, and inspire them.

If you haven’t identified your ideal customer or audience segment yet, here are a few ways to narrow it down:

Build Audience Personas:

Think about who uses your product. Use that information to create a person–3-4 versions of your ideal customer. Some questions you should be able to answer about your perfect customer include:?

• How old are they?
• What industry do they work in??
• What’s their job title???
• What problem does your product solve for them?
• What are their main challenges?
• What information would they find useful?

Once you have your audience segments defined, decide where each one is in your?lead generation funnel.

One buyer persona may be looking for high-level information about your industry, so they spend a lot of time on your blog reading how-to guides and explainers. Another persona might already use your product, so they’ll be more interested in updates and tips to get the most out of their purchase.

Create different email lists for these audiences in your email management software, and tailor your content accordingly. The end goal of your newsletter is to inform and engage, but your audience segments will find different kinds of content useful, so make sure you’re giving the right information to the right people.

Use Your Existing Analytics:

If you have a website, you should have a Google Analytics dashboard set up for it. These analytics can tell you a fantastic amount about the people who visit your website. They’ll also tell you where visitors spend their time, showing you what type of content your audience finds valuable.?

Check Your Competitions:

Who are your competitors marketing to? What kind of information do they include in their newsletter? Taking stock of who your direct competitors are trying to reach can lead to great audience insights–all free of charge.

Ask Your Audience:

If you already have an email subscriber list, use it! Consider sending a short survey or poll to understand better what your audience is interested in. You can also leverage your social media audience by creating?Twitter polls?or asking for feedback.

Creating well-defined audience segments should be one of your main priorities. In fact, 50% of marketers surveyed by Aimtal said that audience research was the most important area to focus on when creating a newsletter strategy.

That number is telling–it’s an industry-wide best practice, so your competitors are researching and segmenting their audiences, too. If you want to create a newsletter that truly stands out, you need to know exactly who you want to reach and what they want to know.

3. Define Your Messaging and Tone

Once you know who you’re writing to, think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. If you’ve created a cohesive?brand identity, make sure your newsletter messaging matches the rest of the content you create. If you haven’t, take some time to think about your values and how you want customers to perceive you. At its most basic, messaging answers the question, “What does your company do, and why does it do it that way?”

Setting the right tone in your email requires considering your audience and goals. Starting your newsletter with “Howdy, ya’ll?” is fine for cowboys, but it might not be for English professors. Your content should also influence your tone, but try to stay upbeat whenever possible.

Remember that email is a highly personal form of communication, and your tone may want to reflect that. Try to be personable and concise; they’ve given you access to their inbox so that you can give them quality information quickly.

Visit our blog to continue reading the final 3 tips for launching a successful email marketing strategy.