Boosting engagement: how newsletters build strong bond with your audience

Newsletters are going from strength to strength!

From blog articles and success stories that you want to promote, to new favourites or rants, a newsletter enables you to bring together and share various information. There’s a reason why 87% of marketing managers use email campaigns to distribute their content. Easy to check in a work setting, a newsletter can play a vital role in engaging your BtoB newsletters audience, whether you are connecting with customers and prospects, journalists and opinion leaders, investors and shareholders or job applicants and employees. But it has to be used wisely.

What is the purpose of a newsletter?

A newsletter is a way to foster loyalty and create a more personal link to your audience. It builds regular connections with your contacts, nurturing relationships and growing your reputation around themes that matter to your brand, from key beliefs to areas of expertise and new solutions. We recommend a gap of no more than one month between newsletters in the BtoC segment, and two months in BtoB.

The main functions of a newsletter:

• Connect regularly with your target internal and/or external audiences;

• Share the latest news and spotlight your expertise;

• Ensure that key information has a bigger impact by circulating it more effectively.

Boost the impact as you lead your community

A newsletter is a powerful tool to connect with your audiences. Use it to keep your strategic audiences informed on a large scale and lead your professional community.

Consider this example: You have a news story or a new solution that you want to tell your customers about. You send a fantastic newsletter to your base of 1,500 contacts and get an opening ratio of 20%. That means that 300 people from your database of qualified contacts read that information, making 3,600 contact points per year with a monthly newsletter.

You would have to spend hours on the phone or in breakfast meetings to get results on that scale! Newsletters offer a great time spent / contacts reached tradeoff when you are looking to convey important information or promote your expertise.

Take it to the next level to raise your profile and recruit new qualified contacts

In addition to nurturing your relationship with existing contacts, a newsletter can be used to recruit new qualified contacts and get the word out to your ecosystem about your company, commitments and solutions.

If you combine a newsletter with a blog or digital media, i.e. a dedicated news site where you publish curated content for your target audiences, such as customers, prospects, shareholders, employees or job applicants, the effect is magnified still further. In this case, the newsletter will contribute 20% of the traffic on the media site or blog, on average. Together with your social media and SEO, it is one of the main content distribution drivers, allowing you to expand your audience to reach new qualified contacts.

Here’s another example: You create a B2B blog to showcase your expertise to customers and prospects, and publish three articles and one piece of multimedia content each month. You include this content in a monthly newsletter for customers and prospects (the same database of 1,500 contacts) and share it on your social media platforms. Within a year, you can reach an average of more than 15,000 readers, or ten times the initial base, and generate over 40,000 content views*, massively boosting your profile within your ecosystem.

This digital media solution offers a way to lead your community through meaningful content across all web channels and fuel your social media presence extremely effectively. Compared against the uncertainty of PR/press campaigns, you will obtain much more reliable and measurable results and can be confident that your messages will get through to your target audience.

*Average data obtained with our B2B customers. Naturally, a lot will depend on your sector of activity, your existing contact base and the size of the audiences that you are targeting.

Our tips for successfully targeting your newsletter audience

• Take the time to decide on the goal of the newsletters and the priority audience that you want to target. It is critical to properly segment your audience so that you send the right information out to your contacts;
  
• Make a genuine editorial promise to your audiences, and then follow through on that pledge. This will provide the foundation for you to build a qualified and loyal audience;
  
• Be authentic when speaking to your audiences. Use the tone that seems most natural to you;
  
• Employ a variety of formats (videos, web stories, gifs) to get your audiences interested in your key information;
  
• Prepare a base of qualified contacts and keep it up to date to optimise your newsletter’s deliverability;
  
• Maximise the recruitment of new qualified subscribers to your newsletter by leveraging all points of contact with your audiences, including the sign-up form on your website, where you can add a box to tick to subscribe to the newsletter, professionals who recently signed up for your webinars, social media posts with sign-up links for the newsletter, sponsored LinkedIn campaigns to grow your audience, and more.

From content creation to graphic design, from statistics monitoring, including open and clickthrough rates, to compliance with personal data collection rules (GDPR), The Editorialist can help you from start to finish, crafting a newsletter with high value to your audiences.