With the rise of social media networks, you may have thought email is now obsolete and abandoned. Well, you are Wrong! Email continues to outshine all other online marketing channels. A well-organized email newsletter is the best way to promote one’s product. It is also the most popular marketing channel with higher conversion rates than other channels. And what better way than using WordPress email newsletter to execute marketing campaigns?
WordPress boosts your chances further of effectively carrying out email campaigns. WordPress is the no.1 CMS and its plugins are open source, extensible, secure, and have high performance capabilities.
Why Newsletters Are Still So Important
Email is used by an overwhelming number of people regularly. 95% of online users use emails regularly and 91% use it at least daily. The ROI generated from email is also higher than that of other channels – $40 for every $1 spent.
Email is a great medium to gain a perspective for your idea with minimal investment and risk. But it’s not an easy channel to master. It calls for specific, precise, top quality, and high-cadence content that are impactful for your readers. Not having good quality content in emails can have low open rates or even high unsubscription rates. Not to forget, it can hurt your business and brand.
Some Common Email Newsletter Bad Practices
- Using background images without care so that the fonts are not visible
- Using images negligently so that most of it is filtered or blocked
- Videos, GIFs, and animations without a context
- Underestimating simple templates
Good Practices:
An organized newsletter will provide the readers with something that’s relevant to them and interesting. And also something that they are looking for.
The key is to avoid focusing your email broadcasts on what’s going on inside your organization and focus instead on curating a newsletter that lets you concentrate on the needs and wants of your customers, earning you a more engaged group of followers in the process. – Productive Teams
To be able to achieve this, you need to be able to have a good understanding of your clients and readers. Understand what they are looking for, what they care about, their preferences and needs, and what they value.
Let’s look at some effective ways to achieve this:
Develop Buyer Personas
Begin with customer feedback that you have already received, social media posts that returned the highest number of interactions, and the kind of sales that brought you the most customer appreciation and high ratings. These should be utilized and sent forth to your users in the form of better organized and curated newsletter services. That’s how you give back to your esteemed subscribers.
You can even directly ask your customers what they are looking for in newsletters through web surveys and feedback.
Send Forth Content That Matters
First of all, you can avoid having your email newsletter being labeled as spam through the following content practices:
- Clean your mailing list by only sending emails to those who have opted-in to your lists
- Evaluate your subject line to free it from spam-worthy and overenthusiastic words
- Use simple and precise calls-to-action
- Keep the file size moderate and appropriate
- Avoid using only image(s) and no text, invalid HTML tags, using email addresses and hostnames in link URLs
When you have ensured the above, develop content that your customers find relevant. Types of content that readers may enjoy are:
- Infographics and presentations
- Humor
- Unique stories that people connect with
- Real events & conferences
- Opinions/Point of view
- Review Posts
- Practical Advice
Your newsletter should be a product of the knowledge you create about your customers through your customers.
Not only that, your newsletters should help your readers overcome challenges, which could be anything from personal to office to business. Build and keep strong relationships by providing readers with good content and provide them at the right time. With A/B testing you can find out what which type of content works the best for you.
Do this not only with individual customers but also with companies you are dealing with and/or selling to. For example, if you are pitching to a new enterprise, you can use your newsletter to showcase that you understand their products/services and the industry they operate it. Also, offer them how your products or services can benefit their business and raise profits.
Build Rapport Through Your Newsletters
Build rapport and authority with your subscribers. Showcase your knowledge about your customer’s needs and the industry you work in through your newsletters. This can attract both attention and recognition from your readers who will want to know your viewpoint. Also point your readers towards new things that you are coming up with, what they should be looking forward to and why they should be excited about it.
Link your originally produced content, blogs, and others, through your newsletters. When you don’t connect your readers to your ready content you are doing a disservice to inbound marketing for your company. By linking your original content, you can drive more traffic to your website. When you identify what content drives more traffic to your website, you are able to produce more newsletters that put you in your readers’ good books. You are also able to find a niche for your content.
Looking Forward to WordPress Email Newsletters
Your newsletters should never be formulaic or boring if you really wish to make it an effective channel for building relationships with your current and prospective readers and clients. Email, compared to other marketing media, is less effort-consuming and more personal. When you master the art of writing a newsletter, your readers will also start looking forward to your content and enjoy consuming it. Newsletters can even allow you to position yourself as a thought leader among your competitors.
While it’s true that focusing and delivering the right content to the right buyer is important, your newsletter will still be incomplete if you don’t automate your email campaigns. And this would be your ultimate step towards achieving transformational email newsletters. To create a systematic approach and automation to newsletters use a competitive email marketing tool. There are many out there on WordPress, such as, MailPoet, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, and AWeber, that is good for growing small businesses. We bring to you another popular and recommended solution.
Related Story: The Right Thing to Do to Your Email Marketing Using WordPress
Why People Love ‘Email Campaign’
Simply because this extension comes with the comprehensive yet easy-to-use ERP solution, know as WP ERP. This plugin comes with everything that you need to manage your small or medium-sized business – CRM, HRM, Accounting and even Project Manager.
With the Email Campaign extension, you get the icing on the cake: curate and achieve automation with your email newsletters. Design your own personalized and automated outbound emails for marketing, campaigns and customer followups. Email Campaign makes sending email newsletters even more simpler and private.
Email Campaign features:
- It comes with several predefined but customizable templates and themes for free
- Live preview builder so you can see the changes real-time
- Schedule Emails
- Generate mailing list from multiple contact lists and even saved search results
- Mobile-responsiveness
- Set UTM parameters for emails to crunch data in Google Analytics
- Create your own templates
- Embed your videos and WP posts with auto thumbnail preview
- Directly insert names, addresses or any other custom field information for all recipients automatically
- Prevent double entries
- Customized buttons and social icons
With Email Campaign, make lead-generation and customer acquisition easy because it has all the essentials that takes to execute a successful email campaign and take your newsletters to the next level.
Do you have other suggestions on crafting impactful newsletters? Or is there an email marketing tool you would like to talk about? Share with us your thoughts in the comments section!