3 tips to ensure your newsletter avoids the bin and how you can improve open rates, engagement, and deliverability.
Thomas Haurum
Are you neglecting your email marketing? You are certainly not alone. Many businesses consider email marketing to be ineffective, outdated, or simply obsolete. As a result, this area of online marketing is often deprioritised and not integrated as a serious component of the overall marketing strategy.
Why does the perception persist that newsletters are outdated?
Some may believe that newsletters no longer deliver a strong ROI, while others see them as a sales channel best left to the early 2000s. Thinking of email marketing as something from the days of flip phones, low-rise jeans, and before Meta (formerly Facebook) took over is perhaps not entirely without merit.
Over the past 10 years, social media platforms such as Meta (formerly Facebook), Instagram, Twitter, and others have experienced explosive growth, transforming from networks for private individuals into essential business tools globally.
For many companies, social media now represents a much larger share of the marketing strategy (and budget) than newsletters. To be clear, this article is not suggesting that you should reduce your focus on social media marketing – social media is undoubtedly the gateway to a vast consumer audience, offering invaluable insights and unique opportunities for segmentation. In fact, the number of social media users increased by 320 million from September 2017 to October 2018.
The key point is that while it is possible to reach a wide audience with your message on platforms such as Meta (formerly Facebook), it can be an expensive form of advertising, and the ROI is rarely particularly high. This is where email marketing comes into play. The important thing is to see these two channels in very different ways – especially when considering how users engage with them, what they expect, and how you should communicate on social media compared to newsletters.
So let’s dive in!
On average, email marketing achieves an ROI of 3,800% (source: Campaign Monitor)! That means for every $1 you invest, you receive $38 in return. It is the highest ROI among traditional marketing channels.
Read even more surprising facts about email marketing here: 70 Email Marketing Stats You Need to Know
But how does email marketing continually achieve such high returns? One reason is that email allows you to create personal and relevant communication with your customers – directly to their inbox. And more importantly, your newsletter subscribers have actively chosen to receive marketing from you. They are already interested in your business, so now it is about converting them from interested readers into customers.
The first step is, of course, to get recipients 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 within seconds – or even worse, marked as spam. If your emails are repeatedly marked as spam, it can damage your deliverability or – in the worst case – your ROI. Remember, today’s consumers must navigate a jungle of messages from companies all competing for their attention every day. So, it is no longer enough to send an email with an offer and then sit back – in this respect, the sceptics are right. That kind of email marketing is dead.
You need to put in a bit more effort to ensure your newsletters are opened, read, and lead to conversions.
But let’s start with the most important part – making sure your newsletter is opened in the first place.
Here are 3 tips to grab your reader’s attention and keep your emails out of the bin.
It is simple. Emails with personalised subject lines have a 26% higher open rate than those with generic subject lines. Let that statistic sink in. If you can achieve over 20% better results just by adding a merge tag with the recipient’s name in your newsletter’s subject line, it is certainly worth considering. However, ensure it always makes sense to the reader – including when they open the newsletter. The effect is greatest when the content genuinely addresses their interests or is a direct message to them – for example, with a special discount, a birthday greeting, or a reminder about items left in their basket on your webshop.
Read more about Abandoned Cart Automation here: Abandoned Cart Automation – Achieve the greatest impact!
If you have a large customer list, it may be worth segmenting it into smaller groups. You can segment by gender, age, purchase history, and more – depending on what is relevant to your business and the information you have available. 74% of online consumers feel they receive content that is not relevant to them, and what happens then? Yes, the email goes straight into the bin or, worse still, the dreaded spam folder. Let’s say you run a business selling contact lenses. In this case, segmenting by gender or age may not be relevant. BUT – it could be highly effective to segment by purchase history. For example, you could send a reminder email to anyone who has not purchased in two months, so they remember to restock.
As harsh as it may sound, this is simply the reality. Over half of all emails are read on mobile devices, and half of these are not optimised for mobile. Ouch! That is a lot of emails that may have taken significant effort to create, but might never receive more than two seconds of attention. You finally get people to open your newsletter, only for it to be deleted immediately. If your newsletter is not mobile-optimised, there is a high chance today’s impatient consumers will delete it faster than you can say “ROI”. So, for goodness sake, ensure you have a template that works perfectly on mobile, desktop, and tablet.
Those were 3 quick tips to help prevent your newsletters from getting lost in the crowd or going straight to the bin. From here, it is up to you to create content that also motivates readers to convert. But that is a topic for another day.
You can read more about newsletters in these articles:
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