Are you still doing newsletters?
Maybe you do newsletters each month with product updates, a blog post, information regarding support, upselling on your products and bunch of other stuff. F*ck you. Well, you are not alone.
I believe that many companies do this kind of newsletters without ever asking their self why they are doing it. Yeah, well you might have a reason that you want to engage your audience and make them know what’s up in your organization. But how well are your newsletter performing?
The first question you need to ask yourself is: Why am I doing this and to who? Let me put it out for you.
Scenario
You are working as a marketer in a small company and you are head of the epic newsletter to your customers each month. Everybody in your organization loves the newsletters. You go talk to several colleagues about what content they want to see in the newsletter. For example you talk to product manager about product updates, the customer service about most common questions and maybe you want to push for a certain event your company are joining next month. So far this is good stuff. You should do this.
What you also should do is to drop the “once a month” thing and focus on the content that are relevant to your audience.
Question: Why am I doing this?
Answer: I am doing this because I want to let our customers know about new and exciting updates in my organization (product updates, webinars, engaging blog posts, events)
Question: To who?
Answer: I am sending this to my customers.
Are you really sure you want to send the same “newsletter” to all of your customers? What if you could dig deeper and make different sendout to different customers? Drop the term “newsletter” and start say sendouts instead.
In order to know how your sendouts are doing you need to measure. The measurement could be: how many are opening the newsletter, clicking, send it to a friend, joining facebook from the e-mail, when are the audience opening the e-mails – should you change the time from early morning to later afternoon because more people are reading it? What content are they reading? These are a few questions you need to ask yourself when you are deciding to who the sendouts are for.
Once again, stop call your newsletter for newsletter. Instead make your online communication as a sendout where you send relevant information depending on what they are interested in. A customer is a person and people want different information and are engaging in different ways.
Scenario
You are working as a marketer in a company producing smart phones. You are doing several sendouts each week to different target audiences in your customer segment.
Segment A. Teenagers. This is your most profitable customer segments. They are eager to get more information on the latest smartphone and how to buy it. You are doing sendouts each week to different teenagers in your segment with marketing automation. For the teenagers who have been customers for a year – you know that soon enough they need a new smartphone and you take advantage of this by doing a sendout regarding a 30% off on a new smartphone. Here you can make even more segments if you are using a CRM system and do sendouts to different customers depending on where they are on their customer journey.
Segment B. Middle age men. Because you are an expert in your business, you also know that you can make a lot of money in this segments but they are not buying new smartphones as often as the teenagers. Here you want to target them with a yearly subscription in order to make them stay as a customer for a long period of time. Maybe you also give them a blog post with technical details because you know they are engaging in that kind of content.
In this scenario you know you customers and which segments need what kind of content in order to engage with your company and your product. You are also using this with marketing automation and depending on what content the customer are interested in they are getting a new sendout a week later with more information with same kind of content.
How much more engagement would you get by doing this instead? Alot.
Just think about this:
Why does a customer leave their supplier?
1% die
3 % move
5% other relationships
9% competitor
14% dissatisfied with the product
68% feel neglected
Source: U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.