Learn about creating a personalized newsletter email progra… (Titles should be no more than 60 characters)

Transcript

Personalized newsletters are an effective and inexpensive way to engage with customers and potential customers. They are delivered by email and because they have broad a appeal, you can send them out to your entire database. You’ll likely find that email newsletters, have an even higher engagement than your social media channels, because people subscribe to newsletters and are usually happy to receive them.

A newsletter is a regularly scheduled communication, about one or more topics that is delivered by email to your subscribers. Companies like newsletters, because they offer a cost effective way to share information with customers and stay top of mind. Newsletters are a great way to showcase your company and brands. They offer opportunities for cross sale and upsell and they can help drive traffic to your website. Best of all, the content for the newsletter probably already exists. That conference coming up next month, that’s a great topic for this month’s newsletter. Have a new product launch in June, that’s another great topic. In Marketo, you can deepen the relationship with your subscribers by customizing the content of your newsletters for each recipient, to engage with them on a one-to-one level. For example, you can use tokens to personalize newsletters by including the subscriber’s name in the subject line of the email, in the body of the newsletter or use information about subscribers to show images and graphics more relevant to their industry or business. Some popular uses of newsletters, are to share company updates, describe new products and features, invite people to webinars and events and share information that is of benefit to your subscribers. It’s important that you have something new and relevant to share in each newsletter.

In Marketo, you can create a newsletter using the email program type, the newsletter channel, and one of our responsive newsletter templates. Newsletters usually go out to a pretty broad audience. So, they are a great opportunity to test things, like subject lines and pre-headers. You can take advantage of the AB testing features, incorporated into Marketo to see what works best with your audience. Plus the newsletter channels built in program statuses, help you track the success of your newsletter in Marketo’s analytics. The steps for sending a newsletter are pretty easy. Identify your audience, this is usually all marketable people in your database. Choose your topics and create a compelling newsletter. Anything new related to your company or industry, can be considered as a topic. Set your send cadence. This can be monthly or quarterly, depending on how much content you want to share. Once you pick a cadence for your newsletter, it’s best to stick with it. Determine when you want to send the email. It should be at a regular time, so readers know what to expect.

Approve the email program and wait for it to send.

Don’t forget to include a smart campaign that sets a person’s status in the program to success when they click one of the links in your newsletters. In your Marketo email program, you will see four tiles called Audience, Email, Schedule and Approval that will help guide you through these steps.

Okay, so you’ve decided to send a monthly newsletter. Here are some tips from our experts to help you make it a success. Use a personalized subject line that gets people to open your newsletter. You can do this by using tokens to show the subscriber’s name. Don’t use all caps or anything that looks like spam. Stay within a 35 to 55 character limit and put the most important words upfront. Also make sure the email’s preheader is relevant to the subject line.

Use dynamic content to show visually compelling images that are relevant to each subscriber’s business or industry and add headlines and sub-headlines that draw in your subscribers and get them to read further. Make your copy educational and compelling. Give the reader the benefit and value of your newsletter and as short and sweet away as possible, so you don’t lose their attention. You can use links to get readers to visit your blog webpage or landing pages if they want more information on an individual topic. Your newsletter should be well designed and easy to read. Consider responsive design, since a huge percentage of recipients, will be reading your email from their phones, tablets and other mobile devices. All of Marketo’s newsletter templates are responsive. Also here are some additional things you shouldn’t forget, include social buttons. Testing has shown that social buttons increase clicks in your emails and make you more credible as an email sender. Finally, don’t forget to include an unsubscribe link, otherwise you’ll be in violation of any global privacy and spam laws. Make sure your unsubscribe link is clearly labeled, so your recipients can unsubscribe or update their email preferences.

After your newsletter goes out, you can monitor its success, using the email performance report and the email link performance report. These help you to analyze opens and clicks, which can be informative in optimizing conversions. Newsletters usually have higher open rates than most of your other communications. So if yours is lower, take a close look at your subject lines to see what can be improved. It’s best practice to review your newsletters in their entirety to see what was interesting, what wasn’t, what to include in future newsletters and where to make improvements.

Okay, so let’s put this into practice and learn how to create a personalized newsletter in Marketo. -