8 Tips to Make Your Company Newsletter Worth Subscribing To

 

Do people eagerly await your company newsletter every week or each month, anticipating the latest groundbreaking content? Do you envision your subscribers sitting at their desks constantly refreshing their email inboxes waiting for the latest installment? Maybe you even dream of a newsletter fan club that holds a get together after every release to discuss your newsletter (see above picture).
Sadly, this is definitely not happening. Quite frankly, it’s probably closer to the opposite.
According to MailChimp, a newsletter sent out by a company with 50+ members has an average open rate of 31.3% with a click-through rate of 3.3%. Those are telling statistics demonstrating that the majority of email newsletters are unappealing and even undeserving of an open. The truth hurts, but it doesn’t mean that your company’s newsletter has to be one of the ones dropping to the depths of your subscribers’ inboxes.
How do you spruce up your newsletter and gain more subscribers in the process? Below I have listed some tips on how to promote your company newsletter and how to make it more appealing.

8 Tips for Improving Your Company Newsletter

1. Offer some sort of incentive for signing up for the newsletter. Maybe it’s a piece of content that can only be found in the newsletter, itself. Perhaps it’s a weekly short blurb of advice from your CEO or other high-positioned employees or even a free eBook download once they subscribe. You have to offer something of value that people will find beneficial in order to get their emails.
2. Include prominent social media buttons at the header of the newsletter. Blending social media marketing with email is a great strategy to increase click-though rates and conversions.
3. Create an email opt-in form for your company’s Facebook page. A newsletter sign-up icon will appear under your cover photo allowing for fans to click and type in their email. This is a no-brainer move that will convert your Facebook fans to newsletter subscribers. MailChimp is a great resource for implementing this form.
4. Promote via your social channels. Continuing with the blend of social media and email marketing, creating a social media post teasing the newsletter leading up to distribution gains some buzz without that much effort.
5. Feature interactive elements. Adding poll questions to the newsletter can create more engagement with your subscribers.
6. Promote your newsletter via presentations. Concluding with a call-out slide can be quite beneficial, especially if the presentation is a hit. You can do the same for SlideShare presentations, too.
7. Conduct a gated webinar. Companies have seen great success in using webinars to drive in more subscribers. This strategy of producing a webinar with notable industry influencers, publicizing the event for a couple of weeks, and then requiring people to sign up for the newsletter in order to attend will undoubtedly gain you more subscribers. However, it does take a fair amount of effort, not to mention great content.
8. Deliver more personalized content. Delivering separate newsletters or different versions to different customer/audience segments can also result in higher engagement and satisfaction. After all, segmenting lists and tailoring content in multiple newsletters will create a more relevant newsletter for your subscriber groups. For instance, if your company produces content on a variety of topics it may be beneficial to send a person in the finance industry a newsletter geared specifically toward financial topics instead of sending him or her a newsletter covering all your content. Making it relevant to your subscribers is key for newsletter success.

Hopefully this list of tips will help your company’s next newsletter. For more on the power of email marketing, check out this informative piece.