Email newsletters are hugely popular. They have become the acceptable method for using e-mail as an on-going form of promotional communication. e-mail newsletters keep your name in front of a very large number of people, all of whom have consented to let you use their email address to reach them. As a result you are building your own opt-in list for free, and the email addresses therein are available to you for ongoing use.
Unsolicited email has become either unethical or plain illegal, and even opt-in lists can be legally problematic if they are shared across several marketers. However as an email newsletter publisher, you are building your own email list. You can continue to use it to send email ethically and legally, because the recipients have requested it. Its a good idea to offer email newsletter subscribers the option of deleting their names from the mailing list. Because of their topic focus, email newsletters are seen by B2B and B2C customers as one of the least intrusive forms of web marketing.
Most email newsletters drive subscribers back to linked web pages to explore a particular topic in more detail.
Good newsletters contain valuable, well-written, I-want-to-read-it-now content prepared by editors who know their topics. They are publications you'd save for future reference; ones you read from beginning to end, then pass along. They're written in a straightforward style and provide information you can use.
Newsletters are predominantly content driven. Although each contains ads and/or promotional copy to varying degrees, emphasis is clearly on content, and lots of it. Abstract concepts and ideas are fine, but supporting detail is critical to effectively evaluate claims and make decisions. It's those details that make good newsletters valuable and worthwhile.
Graphics and images can boost the impact and readability of your email newsletter. However the images need to clearly relate to the content. Many email applications in corporate networks block images automatically so your newsletter needs to make sense even if the images are not visible.
Email newsletters can be revenue generators, with some of the larger circulation email newsletters carrying web advertising as embedded items in the newsletter. Click through rates (CTRs) from email newsletter advertising have been shown in a number of studies to be more effective than click throughs generated from banner advertising.
B2B CTRs for an email newsletter typically range from 5% to 15%, possibly rising to 20% for a highly segmented and personalized list. The highest CTRs are trigger or behaviour based. In other words, the email is sent to a recipient based on some behaviour they showed, such as clicking on a product link, visiting a specific Web page, etc. These very contextual emails can range as high as 50% CTR, with an average of around 30%. (source: emaillabs.com)
There are several factors that impact CTRs for an email newsletter:
- whether you send to a business or consumer audience
- the kind of mailing you send
- how relevant it is to your audience
- how often you send
- your opt-in process
- your use of personalization and segmentation
- how many links you have in your email
- if you are providing content such as articles, whether you include the entire article within the body of the email or you have a teaser or snippet that requires subscribers to click through to a Web site to read.
