Newsletters for Content Marketing

An email newsletter is a periodical email sent by a person or business containing news, updates, curated content from the topic that you signed up for.

Unlike a promotional email that almost hypnotizes you to ‘buy’, ‘join’, ‘enroll’ or email from boss that asks you to change the font on a presentation immediately (at 6 pm on a Friday!), a newsletter just asks to be loved and enjoyed.

Go niche: Write about topics your subscribers signed up for. If you told them, you would send them poetry, it would be awkward & confusing to send them financial analysis or cooking lessons.

Provide value: Before sending the hit button, ask if you were reading this newsletter from someone else, would you trash it in 2.3 seconds or keep it bookmarked as favorite?

Write with intent. Think of what it is that you want to say with this piece. Your every content should either move a reader away from pain or towards pleasure.

Be authentic: Write as if you are having a conversation with someone. Write honestly. Don’t embellish your stories. Write with emotions; to express, not impress.

Steps

Define your goals

Start by defining your goals. They must be integrated into your overall content strategy. Goals must be very specific: for instance, increase prospects by 12%.

Before developing a newsletter, it’s important to ask yourself what focus it will have and how that fits into your overall marketing strategy. Readers have short attention spans that are continuously getting shorter. If they don’t immediately see something relevant and interesting, your email gets deleted. Producing unique content by segment returns routinely justifiable results.

Define your audience

Who do you want to reach and stay in touch with? Should you have one or several newsletters? This can be a matter of resources and commitment within each department, but the closer the content comes to meeting the reader’s specific interests, the better. Of course, recruiting future students is always a top priority and newsletters can be an effective tool in this regard.

Determine how often you will publish

Maintaining a regular schedule is great, but your priority should be on developing relevant content to share. If you send too frequently, you risk recipients unsubscribing from being perceived as a spammer. Some newsletters let new subscribers choose frequency-specific options (“weekly”, “monthly”, “bimonthly”, etc.). Testing which day of the week and times of year are most effective, along with the relative success of all other aspects of your publication, should be an ongoing process.

Continuously develop your contact list

• On your website
• Ask students to sign up on social media
• If it is a general newsletter, have a sign-up button at the end of all your outside communications
• Communicate what they will receive and the benefits of signing up. For a prospective students’ newsletter, an effective call to action could be “Stay tuned to what is happening on campus.”

Create engaging, digestible content based on your audience

Busy readers are likely to browse a newsletter before deciding if any article is worth reading. Enhance your usability with punchy headlines, easily readable short stories and attractive visuals. Since people generally process information better in smaller chunks, be aware that in a newsletter with ten articles, most readers may perhaps only read two or three. Shorter, more frequent delivery might be preferable. Subject lines have to instantly engage, and by limiting what is displayed to an introductory paragraph, encouraging readers to click to see the full article on your website, browsing becomes easier and your website’s traffic is increased.

Use Google Analytics to track your newsletter’s impact on your traffic

Studies analyzing online behaviour suggest email newsletters are the best way to drive users back to websites, where the real engagement takes place, so it is imperative that users are directed to an optimal student recruitment landing page. Feedback and your website’s analytics will allow you to constantly improve the effectiveness of your message and fully integrate the newsletter into your education marketing strategy.