3 tips to help prevent your newsletter from ending up in the bin, and how to improve open rates, engagement, and deliverability.
Thomas Haurum
Are you neglecting your email marketing? If so, you are certainly not alone. Many businesses see email marketing as ineffective, outdated or simply dead. As a result, this branch of online marketing is often deprioritised and not implemented as a serious part of the marketing strategy.
Why does this perception about newsletters exist?
Some may believe that newsletters do not provide sufficient ROI, while others see them as a sales channel belonging to the early 2000s. The idea that email marketing belongs to the era of flip phones, pirate jeans, and before Meta (formerly Facebook) took over the world, is perhaps understandable.
Over the past 10 years, social media platforms such as Meta (formerly Facebook), Instagram and Twitter have grown exponentially. What started as networks for private individuals were quickly adopted by businesses worldwide.
For many companies, social media now makes up a much larger part of the marketing strategy (and budget) than newsletters. This article is not intended to suggest that you should focus less on your social media marketing – as social media is undoubtedly the key to reaching a huge consumer audience, offering crucial data and unique segmentation opportunities. In fact, the number of social media users grew by 320 million from September 2017 to October 2018.
The fact remains, however, that even though you can reach a large group of consumers with your message on, for example, Meta (formerly Facebook), it can be an expensive form of advertising, and the ROI is rarely very high. This is where email marketing comes in. The secret is that you need to look at the two channels very differently. Especially in terms of how users engage with each platform, what they expect, and how you should communicate on social media vs. when you send out newsletters.
So let’s dive into it!
Email marketing delivers an average ROI of 3,800% (source: campaign monitor)!! That means for every $1 you spend, you get $38 back. This is the highest ROI among traditional marketing methods.
Read even more impressive facts about email marketing here: 70 Email Marketing Stats You Need to Know
But how can email marketing continually generate such a high ROI? One of the main reasons is that email marketing enables you to create personal and relevant communication with your customers – directly to their inbox. And more importantly, your newsletter subscribers have already said yes to receiving marketing from you. They are already interested in your business, so your job is simply to convert them from interested prospects to customers.
The first step, naturally, is to get the recipient to actually open your newsletter! This really means: Be relevant or be deleted. If your newsletter is not relevant to your customers, it will be deleted in a split second – or worse, marked as spam. If your newsletters are repeatedly marked as spam, it can damage your deliverability and ultimately your ROI. It’s important to remember that today’s consumer has to navigate a jungle of messages from businesses every day, all fighting for their attention. Therefore, it’s no longer enough to send out a simple email with an offer and sit back – sceptics would be right to say that this kind of email marketing is dead.
You need to put in a bit more effort and go the extra mile to ensure your newsletters are opened, read and convert.
But let’s start with the most important part – making sure your newsletters are opened in the first place.
Here are three tips to grab your reader’s attention and keep your emails out of the bin.
It’s quite simple. Emails with personalised subject lines have a 26% higher open rate than those with generic subject lines. Let that number sink in. If you can increase your open rate by over 20% simply by adding a merge tag with the recipient’s name in the subject line, then it’s definitely worth doing. However, make sure it always makes sense for the reader – even after they open the newsletter. It is most effective if the newsletter’s content also genuinely appeals to the reader’s interests, or if it’s a direct message to them – for example, with a special discount, a birthday greeting, or if they have left items in their basket on your webshop.
Read more about Abandoned Cart Automation here: Abandoned Cart Automation – Get the biggest impact!
If you have a large customer list, it may be a good idea to divide it into smaller segments. You can segment by gender, age, purchase history and more, depending on what is relevant for your business and what data you have. 74% of online consumers feel they are sent content that is not relevant to them, and what happens then? The email goes straight into the bin or, even worse, into the dreaded spam folder. Let’s say you run a business selling contact lenses. In that case, it might not make sense to segment by gender or age. BUT – it could be very relevant to segment by purchase history. For example, you can send a reminder email to everyone who hasn’t bought in two months, so they remember to restock.
As harsh as it sounds, that’s just the way it is in 2019. More than half of all emails are read on mobile devices, and half of these are not optimised for mobile. Ouch! That’s a lot of emails that may have had a lot of effort put into them, but might never get more than two seconds of attention. So you’ve finally got people to open your newsletter, only for it to be discarded immediately. If your newsletter is not mobile-optimised, there’s a high chance today’s impatient consumers will delete it faster than you can say “ROI”. So, for heaven’s sake, make sure you have a template that fits perfectly on mobile, desktop and tablet.
Those were three quick tips on how to avoid your newsletters getting lost in the crowd or heading straight for the bin. After that, it’s up to you to create content that will actually convert the reader. But that’s a topic for another time.
However, you can read more about newsletters in these articles:
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