Email marketing 101: Successful newsletter campaigns

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One of the best ways to kick-start your digital marketing efforts is by building a healthy list of interested contacts and regularly emailing content for them to enjoy. Time and again, eNewsletters have proven to be one of the better tools for strengthening client relationships and engagement:

  • Epsilon revealed that more marketing emails were opened in 2016 than in 2015, increasing by over 3%.
  • Experian’s 2016 benchmark report announced that personalized emails and newsletters got an 11% bump in open rates and received 27% more clicks.
  • Campaign Monitor (the platform Pronto Marketing uses) found that for every $1 spent on email marketing in 2016, senders got $44 in return.

Beyond the dollar signs and percentages are other, harder-to-quantify benefits that make email marketing platforms indispensable. For one, nearly everything you could ever want to track is recorded, meaning there is unlimited potential to analyze, refine, and improve, your content.

Even if you don’t have the time to dirty your hands with high-level tactics like A/B testing, performance analytics, and fallback text, the simple act of sending a branded newsletter adds tremendous value to your business. Prospects and customers will view you as more professional, accessible, and reliable.

And all it takes is for you to send relevant emails to active clients who have given their expressed consent to receive email updates from your company.

How to create your newsletter

Email newsletters can be created as an HTML or a Text-only campaign, and there are many applications available online to help you create, design, edit and deliver them. These are often available on a trial basis for 30 days and can be extended to a monthly subscription rate based on the scale of your operation.

Mobile-friendly are standard for every industry and usually built into most of the mailing platforms. They are easy to use with smooth navigation tools to help you build and re-use templates for your monthly newsletters and promotional emails.

Beyond the logistics of templates and mobile optimization, everything needs to be interesting and easy to digest so readers don’t unsubscribe. Avoid adding chunks of information on the email body and keep the information updated and relevant to your recipients with appropriately placed CTA (call to action) buttons or hyperlinks. Here are some content tips from Campaign Monitor that can help you create better newsletters.

Test, test, test

Don’t forget to test your campaigns! Bear in mind that they’re never going to look the same on every email client, so you should focus on the layout, as well as readability and responsiveness. Testing can be a challenge, but when it’s done correctly it can be your biggest ally. Here at Pronto, we use Litmus to test all our email newsletters.

Schedule your email blast

After you’re done testing your campaign, don’t fire off your newsletters just yet. When you send your emails is just as important as what’s in them. Think about it, much fewer people are going to see an email that was sent at 2AM. By the time your clients are awake, the newsletter you spent so much time crafting could be buried under hundreds of other emails.

To avoid this, analyze the performance of past campaigns and find out the ‘optimal open time.’ For instance, if your email analytics has discovered that a large majority of your clients open their emails at 3PM, you should definitely consider scheduling your newsletters to be delivered around that time. Once you’ve decided on a delivery schedule, stick to it, because publishing on a consistent schedule will build credibility and trust among your recipients.

After all this, you’re probably thinking that email newsletters are a lot of work, but learning the basics of setting up a newsletter campaign will pay off in the form of more open rates, client interaction, and leads.


Need Some Help?

Pronto Web Marketing Support team

If you feel confused or overwhelmed, don’t be. Pronto has you covered. With over 3000+ WordPress websites under our belt, we can help you with all your WordPress needs and more. Check out all the platforms we help our clients integrate their site with.

Schedule a call with one of our Pronto Experts and learn how we can secure your website so you can focus on your business.

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