How To Use Email Newsletters To Improve Your Content Marketing

Content marketing is a bucket term for a lot of different tactics and channels. It includes blogging, social media, video, infographics, reports and more. It also includes e-newsletters. Email newsletters hold an important role within content marketing because they can both pull and push: they catch leads and boost promotion.

Email newsletters improve your content marketing because they:

capture lead information

One of the goals of content marketing is to increase your visibility and ultimately the number of prospects. Your content drives visitors to your site either through organic searching (SEO) or through links shared in social media. When you have prospects who come to your site, interested in your expertise, your e-newsletter is what ensures they stay engaged with you.

Goal: Figure out a way to have a piece of your content, often a white paper or special report, that is available only by providing your email address.

increase visibility

Once you create a great piece of content, whether it’s a blog, video or whatever, make sure your email list knows about it too. Don’t keep your best content hidden from current customers and prospects.

You may be surprised that even current customers, who know you and love you, don’t know everything you are up to. Keep yourself and your organization top of mind, and show off any new products, skills, etc. via your e-newsletter.

Goal: Go ahead and send out most, if not all, of your content to your email list. Bonus points if you segment your email list and only send the content most relevant to the recipient. For example, you might split your list based on topics of interest, or between customers and prospects.

Hold an abundance of data

One of the best features of sending out an e-newsletter using an Email Service Provider (such as Mail on the Mark), is that you get detailed reports on things like opens and clicks. The data is much more detailed and granular than you can get when relying on something like Google Analytics to review your blog traffic.

Also, you can often try things like A/B testing with e-newsletters. So it is an easy way to test out topics (subject lines) or even more complex elements. A/B testing can done on an individual email campaign, but you also gather lots of data about how one e-newsletter compared to another.

Goal: Use your reports from an Email Service Provider to test out what topics engage people the most.

Speak directly to your readers

E-newsletters are an opportunity to be much more personable with your content and tone. You really don’t know when or who is reading your blog. But with your e-newsletter, you are talking to real, specific people.

Goal: Make your email newsletter come from a real person. Show their face, sign their name and use their “from” address. This helps to build an authentic relationship with your readers.

allow Segmentation

Hopefully, with your content marketing, you’re creating different content for different people. Maybe different resources for different phases of the sales funnel. Or, blogs that feature different products or services that you offer.

E-newsletters make this segmentation and targeting easy. Sometimes you have news for the whole list, but other times you just want to send to a partial group.

Goal: Segment your email list and create in-depth or focused content that is relevant to them (but may bore others).

Are Short-lived and timely

Nearly all e-newsletters get read within just a day or two of being sent. So it’s a good place to tie into news events, holidays, etc. Obviously, some blogs are also time sensitive, but then they linger on in the cybersphere for much longer and can feel irrelevant if found by readers.

Blogs, videos and white papers are a great channels to create long-lasting, cornerstone content. Your e-newsletter can be the place for content that’s more fleeting or time sensitive—that’s the reason they’re favored for retail promotions.

Ideally, you’re planning your newsletters in advance, but don’t get forget to look around and see what hot topics can be part of your email marketing right now.

Goal: Take a break from scheduled content if there is a topic that you can talk about with expertise, right now.

Ready to jumpstart your email newsletter? Did you know that the experts at Visible Logic created Mail on the Mark to build professionally-designed and custom-branded e-newsletters? We offer a do-it-yourself, web-based platform, or if you need help from start to finish, take a look at our full-service packages.