Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage to buy from you, or you might want to share internal news and events with your employees.
Whoever your audience is, we’ve put together 7 steps to help you craft and distribute a successful digital newsletter.
There’s no point in writing a newsletter if your audience isn’t going to read it – unless your plan is for them to fast track the email straight into their delete folder (surely not!). Get to know your audience, and by this we don’t mean finding out where they live and stalking them, but seeing what successful newsletters your target audience subscribe to – perhaps through a survey – and then analyse their content. You can then create something comparable, or even better.
Just like with traditional newspapers and magazines, and even radio and tv shows, your newsletter should include sections that make an appearance each issue. Your reader can then easily navigate to their favorite sections and enjoy the surprises of some of your special features too.
As humans, we’re creatures of habit and routine, so we love using templates. Try creating one that you can use each issue. For example, you could always start with a message from the CEO, have a section that introduces a colleague each issue for internal employee comms, or perhaps a ‘product of the month’ section if writing for customers.
Think about it, you wouldn’t invite people round your house if it was full of clutter, and newsletters should be treated no different, so don’t invite people to read your cluttered newsletter – they’ll just turn around and walk away (in a virtual sense).
How do you avoid this – two important principles 1) concise copy and 2) white space.
People are busy. They don’t often have time for long reads, so concise copy is essential. Think about the point you want to get across, and don’t go off topic, no one likes a rambler. In design, white space is crucial.
white space
white space
white space
white space
See what we did there?
It eliminates visual clutter, especially for those reading on their phone.
Make use of branded graphics and photos to make the article more visually appealing, but don’t go overboard. The phrase less is more is particularly apt here – less elements on your newsletter spread makes it easier for people to engage, read and find your CTA.
A CTA is pretty much what it says on the tin, it is a call to your audience for them to take action. No, no cell phones involved here (that would be as creepy as stalking them), we mean placing a link with some accompanying text telling your audience to click it.
Your CTA can be whatever you like it to be, but we do recommend keeping it relevant to the aim / goal of your newsletter. For example a news item in a customer letter about your latest white paper would carry the download link and call to click for a free copy.
Now that you’ve got your perfectly crafted newsletter, it’s time to ensure it’s ready for digital distribution. You have a couple of options here. You can export the design file as an interactive pdf and attach directly to your distribution email. Or, if you’re feeling fancy, you can turn your newsletter into a flipbook. This is a virtual version of your newsletter, that will give your audience the added experience of digitally turning the page. There are many platforms you can use to create a flipbook, but here at Coussins Associates we recommend FLIPHTML5.
You don’t want to anger your audience before they’ve had a chance to read your newsletter (or after they’ve read it, in fact, we don’t recommend ever making your audience angry). Sending out your newsletter at 11pm when they’re drifting off to sleep won’t set you off on the right foot. Put yourself in their shoes and think about a time that you’d like to receive an email newsletter. When do you have time to consider and read it.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the optimum days that research by WordStream found, this gives people time to catch up on emails from the weekend, and before the Friday winddown. Also think about time of day – is morning best or is afternoon better (actually it’s mid-day between 1pm and 3pm that we are told works best).
Decide if you’d like your newsletter to be daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly and be consistent so regular readers, if you are lucky enough to have them, know when to expect their next edition.
Don’t think all the hard work is over once you’ve pressed that send button. You want to be able to track your marketing efforts: has your email been opened? Did anyone click on your newsletter? Have your CTAs been successful? You might be using marketing programs such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, in which case, you can use their inbuilt features to easily pull together data for analysis. Otherwise you may need to think about UTMs (more on those coming up) and other analytics.
We’ve worked with many clients to help create successful digital newsletters, (take a look at our portfolio here for some examples) and get in touch if you’d like to find out more.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
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March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
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Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
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Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more
It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more
The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more
If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more
After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
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Read more
In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more
Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more
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It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more
Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as virtual events become more the norm, we thought we’d share our 3 top tips for effective virtual event organisation.
We’ve learnt to always think through every single step of an event in detail to look for things we might not have anticipated. For virtual events this becomes even more important.
Unfortunately, more likely than not, the glitches will be tech-related and not every person is tech-savvy! Fortunately, there are things you can try out in advance, to ensure that the “easy-fix” problems will not cause issues on the day, that we’d like to share from our own experience of running virtual events.
It’s always a good idea to plan out the user journey. No, not a literal journey – unlike an in-person event, you won’t have to pick up delegates from the airport or figure out where speakers have gone right before they’re due to present. This user journey outlines each step the attendee will experience and through that, you’ll be able to determine what their needs are and foresee any technical issues they may encounter. From there, it’s essential to do a dry run or rehearsal. This further sifts out potential hiccups and helps make it as seamless as possible for everyone. Of course, not all problems can be eliminated entirely (some issues just can’t be anticipated), but at least you’ll have dealt with as much as feasible beforehand and have back-up plans in place to help combat the unexpected.
At this point, it’s worth going through what content you’ll be sharing during your event. If you’re using photos or videos, ensure that all the media you’re using is high-quality. If you’re using presentations, ensure that they’re well-designed, clear and easy for your speakers to use, as well as interesting for your participants. Avoid presentations that are so complex or busy that people are reading them and not listening to the presentation -or, worse still, so intimidated by the overwhelming density that they do neither and get on with their emails instead. Please note complexity ≠ brilliance, quite the opposite. (You can read more about the key to great presentations design and what not to do here.)
Speakers are also a vital part of the event content. It’s worth noting that whilst being connoisseurs at presenting in-person, giving the same presentation through a computer screen requires a very different set of skills. On the technical side, it’ll take some practice to know when to click and advance the slides in order to deliver the visuals and presentation most effectively. It’s also important to plan how your speakers will be presenting – will they be speaking whilst presenting slides? If so, do you want them and the slides in the frame, just one or the other, or a mixture of both? Yes – you can control that in Zoom and other real time streaming platforms. You should also consider things like background or lighting. It’s worth making sure that they’re setup in a room with good lighting and have a good camera and microphone. However, do watch out when using virtual backgrounds – they could ‘feather’ the presenter (give them the little halos around their heads) whether you have a green screen or not and, in some cases, actually end up removing body parts like some digital mortician.
If you are viewing the presenter (and you almost certainly will at some point), will they be full-screen, close-up, standing or sitting? You might think that since it’s a virtual event, everyone, naturally, will be sitting down. However, similar to presenting in-person, when standing, speakers are more energetic and lively, which increases engagement with participants. In fact, this is one of the major differences between good in-person presenters and good live presenters. A bit like some actors who can work best on one medium or another, speakers often find virtual presentations a bigger challenge. The main reason that they don’t translate well is, that it’s much harder to convey your energy and enthusiasm over a computer or tablet screen that someone is watching in their home or office. Overall, it’s key to dedicate some time to plan and brief the speakers, so that you can ensure they’re comfortable with the whole process of presenting in a virtual setting.
Yes, we know, some of these things might seem tedious to go through and check, but this all contributes to the professionalism of your event and the lasting impression it leaves on your attendees. And not doing so may leave a lasting impression that you don’t want to be associated with.
What may seem to you minute detail, could impact the perception of the entire virtual event (and you as organisers) – even factors right down to speakers dressed properly, for example. That’s not to say a hoodie-wearing presenter is not suitable, but strictly in the right circumstances with the right audiences. I may expect a presenter who’s an expert hacker to be wearing a hoodie but not an expert on investment banking. This would be the time to show how well you understand and know your audience. These things all send messages to your attendees so it’s important not to leave these ‘little things’ out. We know a company that recently lost a seven-figure deal because a lead presenter was all hoodied up.
Want help with your virtual event? Click here. Or read more about our operational marketing services here.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.