Constructing your electronic mail e-newsletter technique
The competition for attention is at an all-time high. From social media to television to our inboxes, we are constantly being showered with commandments for our attention.
The times when you had to sit down to read the newspaper are long gone. People are now more likely to consume relevant content when it’s delivered to a place where they already spend time – in their email inboxes, for example. And this is what the market shows: a new e-mail newsletter appears every 15 minutes, and new tools have enabled its creators to reach readers faster and more efficiently than ever before.
It’s no surprise, then, that many marketers are taking advantage of the opportunity to grow their email audience, either as a core strategy for the company or simply to re-engage their customers.
To remind newbies and incumbents alike in the newsletter space, an email newsletter strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s no shortcut to taking you from one great idea to tens of thousands of highly engaged subscribers overnight.
That said, 1440 Media has taken some hard blows in the past 3+ years. So read on for advice on what we would do if we started our email newsletter strategy today.
Content is critical to your email newsletter strategy
The quality of the content is crucial. Subject line tests are great; it can make a difference whether or not someone opens the first email you send them. However, the content of this email determines whether the reader will open emails 2 to 200.
Test the layout, design, tone, length, links, and personalization (among other things) of your email before doubling down on a strategy for getting subscribers.
Avoid clickbait-y subject lines entirely. You can see a great open rate on this particular day, but you have to keep in mind that you are playing the long game. You are likely to see an increase in unsubscriptions and lose the trust of recipients who might otherwise become daily readers of your newsletter.
It’s best to always create a newsletter that is good enough that readers can open it regardless of the subject line.
Email open rates are a positive feedback loop
If you are comfortable with the content of your newsletter, it is important to note that open rates are a positive feedback loop – that is, the higher your open rate, the more it will go up. This is one of the most underrated facts in email.
Every inbox provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) assigns a “reputation” to your IP address and email address. As that reputation improves, your email regularly ends up in the main inbox of your recipients. However, if your reputation worsens, you can find your newsletter in the Spam, Junk, Promotions, or folders [ominous voice] the email is invalid.
But how do you improve your reputation?
A good first step is to make sure you are only sending to people who love your content and who regularly open or click your email.
Take this simple example: you have an email list with 100 subscribers. Every time you send a campaign, 15 people open it. 45 people have opened at least one email. Therefore, your daily open rate is 15% and 55 of your subscribers have never opened an email.
Here is a suggestion: Only send your campaigns to your 45 “openers”! On your next mailing, increase your open rate from 15% (below average, bad reputation) to 33% (above average, good reputation) without affecting the total number of openings; the remaining 55 didn’t open anyway.
Over time, you will find that your open rate increases over 33% as inbox providers trust you more and place you in the main inbox more regularly. Your readers will appreciate you more too: Gone are the days when a non-reader would angrily mark you as spam because you put them in their already full inbox.
There are also tools that can whitelist your IP address and email domain with the largest inbox providers, but that’s better after you’ve scaled your audience to hundreds of thousands. What us to …
Scaling your email newsletter
How do you go from being over 70 friends and family to over 700,000 subscribers (like we did)?
Focus on high quality acquisition channels right from the start – channels that attract not only subscribers but also dedicated email openers.
One of the best ways to grow is by trading deals (or “cross-promos”) with other newsletters, we found. For example, we recommended our readers to check out a partner newsletter and they in turn recommended 1440 Media to their subscribers.
This worked very well in the beginning, especially when we worked with newsletters of similar size because people who open one email newsletter are more likely to open another newsletter.
Regardless, we found that our organic word of mouth growth rate was incredibly high to start with thanks to – you guessed it – strong and consistent content that our readers love.
Over time we have learned to double high quality acquisition channels. That still includes email newsletters, but we now pay more directly for email placements more often than we do barter deals.
We have also expanded our media channels to include sponsorship of podcasts and YouTubers with a similar audience. This includes topics such as science, professional development as well as political and philosophical thinking – or more generally “how things work”.
Most importantly, we’ve found that introducing our brand through a trusted source of information far outperforms programmatic ads with little to no context.
For the remainder of 2021 and beyond, we will continue to target high quality verified channels and test more aggressively where we believe we can be successful. We’re also more conscious of our funnels the first time a person subscribes. How do we get someone to open five consecutive emails? How can we motivate someone to refer a friend? Is there a point where we can save someone from not opening our emails anymore?
At our current level, 1% improvements in these metrics can increase our daily openings by thousands, so the impact can be huge.
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To recap, our email newsletter strategy best practices:
- Rely on quality and think long-term when expanding your email audience.
- Create great value–Add content and avoid clickbait.
- Send only to people who actually open.
- Choose acquisition channels wisely and never buy an email list (at least for legal reasons).
Also, listen to your readers every day and encourage feedback.
More resources on email newsletter strategies
Put the “letter” back into the “newsletter”: Ann Handley talks about marketing smarts [Podcast]
Seven Ways Newsletter Marketing Still Works for Professional Service Providers
How to make an extraordinary newsletter, according to the people who did it