Just yesterday, Anna just shared how a potential client of ours was pointing out the challenges of a regular newsletter.
It’s not easy, you know? To find something valuable to write about and share with our audience regularly.
To help you figure out the challenges of a regular newsletter and how to overcome them, we sorted a few main pains and solutions. Maybe you can relate to this.
The challenges of a regular newsletter
After Anna expressed how her potential client was reaching out due to their struggles with sending a newsletter regularly, we selected a few important topics and how we deal with them.
Having something to say every day, week or month
It was best to attack this one immediately since it might be the “elephant in the room”. We would say that it might be around 60% of the reasons why people ask for our support in email marketing and automation.
Depending on your case, it’s tough to have something to communicate with every day, week or month. Very much so when what you need to reveal it’s irrelevant to your audience.
Key insight: Doesn’t matter what you need to share to your audience if it’s irrelevant to them in the first place.
This means that you need to develop something entertaining or informative, with a real benefit. And for each regular newsletter.
It’s a pain. But you can do it. Check our suggestions below.
- Know your audience.
It will be easier to send them something relevant if you know what makes them smile when they read your email.
Check your newsletter analytics if you don’t know what makes them happy. It shows you which links and content topics have reached better engagement. It would be best if you segment your audience based on that data. - Have a proper content plan pre-scheduled for the entire year, even though you can add a few trendy subjects according to the season, social buzz and so on.
- What’s in it for them?
Every piece of content you share in that newsletter should have some benefit. That doesn’t suggest a monetary one only. It can be something that will make your customers’ life easier. - What are your customers’ struggles? If you know it, you can address it and provide potential solutions. Even if it’s not directly associated with your business model. Some SaaS brands share ideas about having a better working office environment because they know that’s what their audience is struggling with.
- Search through Google trends to find what people are searching for at the moment. If you can make a match between your kind of content and that topic, go for it.
Everything ready and on schedule
To keep up with the schedule and send your newsletter on time can be stressful, especially if you don’t have a process to make your life easier.
You need to handle content, design, subject lines, audience segmentation, testing… It’s a continuous process until the moment you click on “Send”. And then, you still need to make sure that the results are according to the expectation.
So, these are a few suggestions that may help you with the challenges of a regular newsletter.
- Make a content schedule plan, as mentioned above. With this plan, add a few more interactions. For each content, ensure that you address the designer, the coder, the validation executives, the tester list and the target audience (segments). It’s a way to make everything clear to everyone with deadlines for each one.
- Knowing the steps to launch your newsletter each time will help you organise the entire workflow.
- Make your process. If you know who to reach out to, how and at what time, it will be easier to make sure that you keep to the schedule.
Surprises coming up as challenges of a regular newsletter
As much prepared as you plan to be, there is always something that comes as a surprise. It might be the designer that forgot to create the images to illustrate the content, or the storage disk just went wild; something can come up. This certainly comes as a challenge to a regular newsletter.
Check out these suggestions for a rainy day.
- For these kinds of moments, the only thing you can do is have a backup plan. Always prepare a backup email and send it when something comes up without notice.
- If you don’t have a backup email, maybe you can do a special “sorry” message explaining what happened. If you show that you’re human, it can benefit your brand. Your audience knows that they’re dealing with real humans, and accidents happen. It humanises the brand, if you will.
- If you can’t do it through your email platform, use your other channels to reach your audience and explain the situation. Tell them you will solve it ASAP, and you’re working on solving the problem.
Understanding the data of a newsletter
Use your regular newsletter to understand your audience better. With the analytics of each email sent, you can understand what makes your audience click, open and share.
Your bottom line is also critical. You need the understand the ROI of your email marketing and automation investment.
To help you with that, here you can find a few tips to tackle that need.
- Analyse each newsletter separately. See what worked and not worked with your content and Call-to-Action (CTA).
- Compare your previous newsletters to each other. That will make it clear what you need to do more of.
- Create segments based on what they clicked or opened more.
- Use dynamic content to deliver to each segment a different approach per topic.
- Find a relation between your content flow and the conversions in your landing pages or closing deals.
- Understand when you should activate some kind of automation or drip messages to approach a subject.
There’s still so much more that we could add to this, but if you apply these tips, you can overcome the challenges of a regular newsletter.
It means that you have no excuse to start or keep your regular newsletter right away. Remember, it should create a habit in your subscribers to receive your newsletter on that particular day. When that doesn’t happen, you want them to feel a strange feeling of missing out.
When you accomplish that, you’ve already won.