Newsletters (both e-mail and e-newsletter types), in business-to-business (B2B), are considered as the 4th most effective type of content marketing tactic*. They represent a perfect tool for sharing educational, institutional, and informative content, as well as commercial content to qualified and consensual targets (permission marketing is a must!) in order to interact with this audience. They are the perfect occasion to create a stronger relationship with clients, and to keep your business in your prospect’s mindset.
Newsletters are also excellent ways to generate traffic on the company’s website. Let’s keep in mind that, from an SEO perspective, it’s important for a company to host their newsletters on their own site, since e-mails are not indexed by google.
In order to guarantee the pertinence and efficiency of such a tool, it is necessary that marketing managers always keep in mind the following critical points :
- Recruiting the audience: Opt-ins and updates of lists (following cancelations of subscriptions, permanent or temporary e-mail address errors, new subscriptions, etc…) must be performed, at minimum, once before each new release. Additionally, a good indexation of the newsletter in search engines will facilitate its visibility and by so doing, increase its readership.
- Analysing the audience: Analysing the readership is very useful as it assures the pertinence of the delivered content.
- Identifying the content: The content must have added value and must meet the needs and expectations of the reader base.
- The esthetical aspect: Even though the newsletter must conform to the graphic scheme of the company that does not prevent you from updating and refreshing it regularly.
- Analysing the newsletters: Since we can’t improve what we can’t measure, analysing the newsletter consists of identifying the most popular subject matter, the articles that generated the most comments, etc…
- The publication frequency of the newsletter: It must be published regularly and as a function of the quantity of information a business wishes to communicate.
These days, there exists a multitude of tools that allow a business to control all these points, but a business has to be aware of these tools, and has to actually use them.
*Sources: 2010 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and trends Survey
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