When you think about Email Marketing, one of the first things that comes to mind is a company’s email newsletter. Or in some circles, it’s called an “eNewsletter”. Regardless, it became a must-have communication tool in a business’s communication and marketing strategy with a lot of businesses creating and distributing them on a regular basis. But with prevalence of re-marketing and social media tools, I firmly believe that it is time to revamp the standard format of a company’s email newsletter.
The standard email newsletter typically leads with a main customer-focused article, followed by secondary articles that marketing or sales deemed important to promote to customers, users, constituents, etc. Each email newsletter is focused on getting the majority of your audience interested in what you're doing and saying – and to get them to take action! Go to this landing page, download this white paper or click to learn more, right?
The second question for an email newsletter is how frequently a company should create one and deliver it? Should it be weekly, monthly or quarterly? Is there enough content for a monthly email newsletter? Will a quarterly newsletter be OK or has too much time passed for the content to be relevant?
And let’s not forget about the side bar or email footer. The multi-purpose area of an email newsletter that contains information that never changes, like contact information and maybe a link to an article that didn’t make the cut for the main topic.
Looking forward, today’s email newsletter has to feel real-time.
With our status updates, check-ins, blog posts, and constantly-connected mentality, the standard email newsletter is not as valuable as it used to be. Today, readers opt-in and want their information delivered to them in real-time.
In our *new* email newsletter format, there isn’t a main customer-focused article. It’s a mixture of the best-of-the-best published marketing content – articles, posts and tweets – that have written, promoted and or endorsed on the company’s blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel, etc.
With the *new* format, the frequency of the newsletter then depends on the amount real-time content the company has aggregated during a certain period of time. Instead of just tracking one email newsletter article, the benefit is to show your readers how much content you share across all your communication and marketing channels. It will demonstrate that you’re invested in connecting with the reader through their choice of social media and how they consume their content online.
For example, the newsletter format would read more like a Top 10 list of company content from every online channel backed up with micro analytics to back up why you’re aggregating inside an email newsletter – the most read blog article from last week, the most “Liked” post on Facebook, or the Twitter link that continues to get re-tweeted.
Lastly, the email newsletter would be published when new information is available versus emailing one just to stay on a consistent communication timeline. Thinking this way, we can apply some good-old mom logic to our newly reformatted email newsletter, “If you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all”.