Obsessed with B2B marketing? You should be a PRO member! Join now at 25% off (or 50% off for teams).
Listen
NEW! Listen to article

Many companies and brands consistently make useful, informative content... which then merely sits on a website, hidden on a page that takes too many clicks to find.

Marketers who want to get more out of their content, including blog posts, need to properly benefit from their thought leadership by putting it in front of the right audience at the right time. Otherwise, it remains out of sight, out of mind.

How can marketers improve content engagement and views? Email newsletters.

Distributing your thought leadership, and content in general, via email newsletters has a significant impact on readers: It improves brand exposure and increases spokesperson awareness. Not to mention, newsletter subscribers engage more with the brand.

As a result, every company—from leading news publications to D2C brands to martech providers—offer subscribers personalized newsletter content. Consider the following stats:

  • Newsletters have an average open rate of 22%, compared with a fraction of that percentage for Facebook audience/ad interactions.
  • Greentech Media's newsletter visitors spend 80% more time on site than visitors from other channels.
  • Vox's newsletter readers spend an average of 110 seconds on the site, compared with just 40 seconds of Facebook visitors.
  • New York Times visitors are 2X more likely to become paid subscribers if they subscribe to a Times newsletter first.

Newsletters: The Cornerstone of Your Email Strategy

Newsletters are the cornerstone of a successful email strategy because they build trust among your subscribers.

But brands can't simply throw content links in an email and hope subscribers get the hint. They won't. Instead, marketers must make the newsletter enjoyable and engaging, using a more conversational tone with subscribers.

Emails bombard all of us daily, and they've been doing so especially over the past two years. Increasing competition for subscribers' attention requires a reaction and adjustment from marketers hoping to get more out of content and blogs.

For example, at Litmus, the effectiveness of one of our top-performing newsletters, Litmus Weekly, suddenly decreased in 2020. Open rates and click-to-open rates slipped. It wasn't driving the traffic it once did.

Since 54% of companies had increased email volume, we could have chalked it up to increased competition across the board and not changed anything. But we made some changes:

  • Optimized the reading experience by creatively encouraging readers to scroll through the entire newsletter
  • Injected our newsletter with increased personality and a company narrative/voice
  • Included the right content in the newsletter, not all of it

Now, metrics have climbed back up to previous levels and improved from pre-pandemic numbers.

How can you implement changes and improve your newsletter and content metrics?

Email Best-Practices for Optimizing Newsletters

Enter your email address to continue reading

How Email Newsletters Can Fix Marketers' Content and Trust Problems: Three Sets of Best-Practices

Don't worry...it's free!

Already a member? Sign in now.

Sign in with your preferred account, below.

Did you like this article?
Know someone who would enjoy it too? Share with your friends, free of charge, no sign up required! Simply share this link, and they will get instant access…
  • Copy Link

  • Email

  • Twitter

  • Facebook

  • Pinterest

  • Linkedin

  • AI


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Melissa Sargeant

Melissa Sargeant is CMO at Litmus, where she runs worldwide marketing initiatives. including corporate and product branding, demand generation, product marketing, public relations, and event management.

LinkedIn: Melissa Sargeant

Twitter: @mhsargeant