Email newsletter - the authentic way to be heard

Introduction

In a world where we receive so many emails, many feel like newsletters have passed their prime. And maybe they are right.. Or are they?

In today’s episode, we’re going to look at the craft of writing a great email newsletter. Something that your subscribers will want to read. We'll show how to turn this often wasted opportunity into something that will excite your contacts and get them clamouring for more.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet

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Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.

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Episode Transcript

Even before the world moved online, newsletters formed the core of most marketing communications. They provided news, company updates, and advice to customers and prospects alike. But in a world where we receive so many emails, Many feel like they've passed their prime, and maybe they're right, or are they? There are many ways to write a newsletter, and they don't all involve dull as ditch water promotions and clickbait links. In today's episode, we're going to look at the craft of writing a great email newsletter. Something that your subscribers will want to read. I'll show you how to turn this often wasted opportunity into into something that will excite your contacts and get them clamoring for more. So let's get started. Hi there, I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. So welcome back again. Thank you very much for joining. Over the last couple of episodes, we've talked quite a lot about emails and despite the fact that we've got so many ways to communicate with each other these days. Emails still form the core of our business communications. There's tools like Slack and WhatsApp and Teams and others. They may be seeing a rise in popularity in some organizations, particularly for internal communications, but there's still nothing that beats a good old email as a tool for mass communications. So automate those tools. We've talked a lot in the last few episodes about how to create sales emails, marketing emails. But the elephant in the room, the one thing that we haven't looked at yet, is the good old email newsletter. Email newsletters, ugh, not those I hear you saying. Yeah, you're right. I mean, they have been around for a long time. They've been around since the dinosaurs. And, yeah, without a doubt, I mean, that's probably one of the single biggest forms of congestion in my, uh, mailbox. But, you know, here's the thing. No matter how much we might hate them, they're still effective and you can't beat them. Or, perhaps, maybe I should sort of qualify that very slightly and say, yes, they're effective, but they're effective if they're done well. You see, the problem with newsletters for many companies is that they just really don't see the potential. They don't treat them seriously. Many companies just believe that they're something that they should be doing and they just push them out to a junior member of staff, some marketing assistant, or PA, or somebody like that, and just says, go out, push out a newsletter, and no wonder they don't get results. You're asking somebody that's not a marketing expert to create a piece of exciting content. You know, the poor person, they're just going to default to standard behavior. They're going to go out there and ask the team members what they should talk about. They're going to write a few simple articles about maybe things like product updates, new hires, or maybe if they've got a little bit more experience, they might summarize a few blog posts. But that's about it, and then they're going to go and send it out. Often the problem is there's very little plan, there's little thought behind newsletters. It's just something that's part of a monthly schedule. But the thing is, it doesn't have to be that way. If you can just get a few people behind the email and you get a few key executives in the company to invest maybe just 30 minutes of their time each week, it's easy to create a great newsletter. I do it myself. I sit down once a week, first thing in the morning normally, and I write. It takes some getting used to. But the returns are well worthwhile doing and that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. So we've got Daniel here as always and um, Daniel's been given the task of going away and trying to look at the newsletter for his company this week. So maybe we can jump over and have a quick chat with him and see how it's been doing. So great to have you back Daniel. Thanks for joining us again. How's things?

Thank you Simon. Uh, things are great. I did a lot of sport this weekend. I went climbing yesterday. Yes. Ah,

okay. Anywhere nice?

Oh yeah, you know in Donvan there's this big hall for bouldering.

Ah, okay. I know the sort of thing you mean, yeah. So an indoor one, not

outdoors. Yes, indoor. It's called Steinblock. Ah,

very cool. No, not my sort of thing. I'll leave you to that. That was great. So we've been talking about newsletters today. Yes, and I know you've been sat listening. So any thoughts and questions from you? Have you tried doing newsletters yourself? And how's that working for you? Yes, I started

sending newsletters I'm not really getting good results from that, and I'm a little bit frustrated, I have to admit, because I spent quite some time every couple of weeks to write these newsletters, and somehow I don't really get any reaction from

it. Oh, interesting, okay. Yeah, I think newsletters still definitely seem to be working. They started off very much as newsletters, but people just really aren't interested in that sort of content anymore. And I think that's why I hear so often that newsletters just aren't worthwhile. Are people reading newsletters? Well, people aren't reading newsletters anymore. No, they're not interested in whether you've got a new product release or whether you've got some new staff that have joined the company or whether you've hit your one million revenue number, those sorts of things. I don't think people are interested in that. We've got so much stuff coming into our inboxes these days that we're looking for something that's going to help. It's used obviously to stay top of mind, but that doesn't mean you have to talk about your company all the time. You can just talk about things that are of interest to your audience. Give them some personal offers. By all means. If you've got a product update, that's going to give them something new. Talk about that. If you've got a discount, fair enough, talk about that occasionally, but also offer them value in there. That's the key thing I think that they're going to be looking for to decide whether or not they're going to stay subscribed. Okay, so

I need to put something in the newsletter that is of value for the recipients.

Uh, yeah, exactly that. Yep. Mm hmm.

Okay. Now, how do I do that? Like, uh, let's take Demodia for example. What do you send out that is of value in each

newsletter? There's a couple of ways that we do newsletters, so I think the key things that we do is we send out different newsletters to different groups, so we don't just send out one newsletter to everybody. We've got a group of people that are interested in marketing technologies, whether that be HubSpot or something else, and we've got a group of people that are interested in storytelling, they're interested in processes more than technology. So, We send out different things to those different groups. So we've segmented our groups, as we've talked about before, and we send out a regular newsletter or regular articles with content that's relevant to those groups. Then the question is, where does the content come from? We talk often about blog posts that we've got, and our blog posts tend to be articles that help people. Like these podcasts, the whole idea of the blog post that we're pushing out is to tell somebody how to improve themselves, tell them how to do their job easier, tell them how to use some new technology, tell them how to develop or implement some new strategy within their business. So it's about self improvement largely.

Okay, so when you send out newsletters, you always talk about things that people could improve about themselves. Or about how they do

business. Yeah, if you're going to spend the time to read something, it has to have value to you. And the thing that has value, certainly in most business to business situations, is something that's going to give you personal value. It's either going to help you to improve something, it's going to entertain you, or maybe more on the consumer side, it's going to offer you financial value.

Okay, I understand. Nowadays, you know, things have changed a lot, and people don't like to read that much anymore. Do I really need to have a newsletter? Like, does it really benefit me to

have one? You're right, it takes a bit of time and effort to put them together. But I think there's various reasons to keep a newsletter. Number one, is if you are sending emails out to people, you're staying top of mind. Someone might not have a project or might not have an interest for you today, but they might be interested in the general ideas that you're talking about. And then if they remember who your brand is at some point in the future, they're going to come back to you in that. So I think a newsletter definitely has a very good purpose for staying top of mind there. The other thing that I would say that helps you with newsletters is more on the technical side. So if you're spending the time building an email list over a period of time, people are going to leave their companies, companies are going to get acquired, people are going to change their email addresses. So on average, around 30 percent of any list Each year goes stale. Basically, they don't exist anymore. They're not relevant. And by sending out a newsletter, what you're doing is you're helping to keep that list clean. If you only send out a promotion once or twice a year, you're going to get incredibly high bounce rates. Whereas if you send out more regular emails, you'll have lower bounce rates per email, which you can manage much more effectively and clean up.

otter. ai Or unsubscribe themselves if they know they're leaving a company. So it's definitely

worth to still have a newsletter and send it out regularly. Mm hmm. Yep. Not just to get new customers, but also to keep your lists clean. But can you give me any best practices to how I should create my newsletter? Or do you have any good examples of companies that do send out good newsletters regularly?

Yeah, okay, so we talked a bit earlier, you asked about the Damodian newsletter, so I think the best practice is To personalize your newsletter, so to make sure that you're sending out either different newsletters to different segments of your audience, or to include some sort of dynamic content. So we've talked in previous episodes about the fact that HubSpot has dynamic content. Um, so the ability to change a section of your newsletter based on something that it knows about the recipient. That's a great thing you can do in your newsletter. So then you can create one newsletter and just tailor a few sections with content or offers that are relevant to the person that you're sending it to. So I think that personalized approach is great. The other thing that you can do for personalization is you can use a preference center to ask people what they're interested in, you know, capture some interests, say, you know, are you interested in cyber security versus network administration versus. other sorts of topics like that, you know, give them three or four topics that are of interest to them and let them subscribe or choose the things that they're interested in and then give them the appropriate content in the newsletters. The other thing that I would say is just storytelling. Storytelling is great within newsletters. It's a great way to keep in touch. One of my favorite newsletters, I think, is, is Airbnb, and there's others that do this as well. But, you know, Airbnb, you do get emails from them that are promoting particular apartments or somewhere you can go and visit. But they don't just talk about the apartments, they talk about ideas, they talk about people that are rented out there. They talk about experiences that people that have lived in those apartments or rented those apartments have actually had when they've gone and visited places. You know, they talk about the places and the experiences that people have had when they visited specific properties, rather than just always talking about the properties and the company.

That's actually a pretty smart move because I think even I would read those newsletters and I rarely read any newsletter.

Yeah. And it's the same with others. I mean, Nike does a very similar sort of thing. And Red Bull, of course, does storytelling fantastically with all of the different things that they sponsor. So, you know, there's ideas there that you can take. It's not necessarily about talking about the product all the time. Think about telling stories about. How a product was created. For example, look behind the scenes in your business, talk a bit about the business and how it's operating. You know, people are interested in some of those behind the scenes looks. Just think about modern film promotion trailers, for example, where before they'll put out a big film, they'll put out some behind the scenes clips or some outtakes and things like that. You know, people are interested in that sort of stuff. It gives transparency. I

understand. Yes. You let the people look behind the curtains. Absolutely right,

yeah.

With that being understood, is there anything else that you've tried or seen working with other companies I could use instead of a traditional

newsletter? Yeah, a couple of things I think that's worth mentioning. So, number one I'd say play with the frequency of how often you send things. So by that, I mean, you could send out a regular newsletter that's a sort of more of your newsy style letter, maybe once a month. But then in between those, every other week, you might send out something that's more educational. So you can use different things at different cadences. The other thing that I would strongly recommend, and this is something that we've been trying ourselves, is that if you subscribe to Demodia's newsletter, or if you go onto the Want Authentic site and you subscribe to the newsletter on there, what you'll get back is not a newsletter. When you subscribe, it talks about getting my advice. And actually, that's exactly what happens is once a week I write a personal message. You know, I sit down and I look at the conversations like that you and I have had or that I've had with other customers in the week. And I think what's interesting that I can take out of those conversations that might be interested to my readers or even the listeners on here. And I take those ideas and I put them down into a personal email and I write it like a personal email. You know, I think about one or two of those customers as I'm writing this that I explain to them how to do something, you know, why they should think in a certain way, how they can improve. The way that they're selling or positioning their products. And I put that into a few paragraphs in an email and I send that out once a week and that actually comes out from my email address. So I encourage people at the bottom there if you've got questions or, you know, if I've prompted anything with the comments that I've made, you know, get back to me. And I must say that has been probably the biggest change in our overall newsletter subscriptions. You know, we've seen newsletter subscriptions going up since we stopped talking about just subscribing to our general newsletter and more talked about get advice from Simon. And the other thing is that we've seen the actual interaction rates multiply. When people were sent through to blog posts, that's great. We got a good click through rate in there, but we didn't get many responses back from that. However, now the messages are coming from me and people hit on the reply button. It's unbelievable. You know, they do answer the questions or they come back to me and say, yeah, this is one way of doing it. How about doing this or I've tried this and it doesn't work and they're actually hitting the reply button and I'm getting several mails each week now from individuals just saying, you know, help me a little bit more. And that to me, that engagement is the key thing that's interesting.

I like your approach very much. I mean, imagining that you're talking to a customer directly to solve his or her problems while writing this newsletter. I think it's a great idea. Yeah. Thank you very much for those practical tips.

Cool. Well, thanks very much again for joining us, Daniel. Enjoy your week and, uh, yeah, we'll catch up again next week. Thank you very much

for

having me. So, thanks for your time and questions, Daniel. Yeah, I think you had some really good points in there today. In particular, I liked your last one about the less traditional approaches in there. There's definitely something that people need to think about. The thing is that um, you know, if it's a startup or a small business you want to be heard, then if you're sending out the same old corporate newsletters, the same old blog post links as everybody else, Then you're going to be treated the same as everybody else. People are looking for personal, authentic advice. They're looking for original thoughts. That's the sort of stuff that they're engaging with. If you're doing the same as everybody else in your industry, then you just become part of that background noise. So if you want to be heard. Then as Apple would say, think different. So if you're having problems setting up and optimizing your emails, then you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your marketing and give you an easier way to scale your sales. So we're at the point in the show again, where I like to give you some homework, something that you can take away that will help you improve your marketing and drive business through your sales pipeline. Today, I want you to think about how you can make your newsletter different. Don't just do the same stuff as everybody else. So my point is to get you started. First thing that I want you to do is to decide how often you're going to send your newsletter. That's important because whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, or somewhere in between, the most important things are how you're going to keep your audience engaged and how you're going to keep your content fresh. You know, all of the above can work, but your content needs to be fresh and your audience needs to be engaged. As soon as that goes, then your newsletter starts just being put into the trash. The next thing you're going to think about, you're going to think about how you present yourself. So whether you present yourself as a technical product expert and you give advice on maybe specific tools or software, maybe you're a tax or insurance advisor, something like that, and then you could talk about tips on savings, inheritance advice maybe, or things like how to manage your car or general personal well being. You know, they're all topics that your sort of audience would be interested in hearing more about. Or maybe a communications provider, you know, going the other end of the chain. You could use examples of how your technology is helping people to make connections. You know, that might be between people, or it could be technology connecting to technology. It doesn't really matter. Think about the stories that you can tell in there. So don't just talk about the technology and the product. Tell some stories. The final pointer that I want you to think about is the presentation style. So, with this I want you to think about how your audience perceives you when they read your newsletter. So, there's a couple of key things that I want to mention here. Firstly, is to think about who you're going to send your email from. Who's this going to appear to be written by and who's the name in the title going to be? So, there's been a lot of research done on this. And I want to give you a quick bit of advice. Brands never perform as well as individuals. You know, take for example this, Mercedes F1 team. You know, Mercedes is a massive company in EFTA, and particularly within Formula 1. You know, they're the most followed Formula 1 team out there, pretty much maybe Ferrari are pushing them. They've got, what, 13 million followers on Instagram. However, on the other hand, if we look at their star, or former star, should I say, Lewis Hamilton, he's got 36 million followers, you know, three times as many followers almost as the company itself. And you know, as a small business, that's really key. You're never going to build a great following by talking through your brand. You need to start off by talking through an individual. So you'd be well advised to use CEO perhaps, or another key figurehead within your company and send out your messages. at your newsletters, even do your social posts through that key person versus sending them out from some generic company email account. The other thing that I want to highlight in this area is that writing style is important. You know, everybody can summarize a blog post and send that out. It's easy, it's quick, but the thing is that readers know that too and people value effort. If they think that you're spending a bit of additional time thinking about how you write your content, then they'll value your newsletter more. The best performing newsletters that I've worked with, they come from an individual and they're written in their voice. You know, they're quirky, they have typos, the grammar sucks, but they're original at the end of the day. That's the key thing. So, I want you to take those thoughts and I want you to come up with your own newsletter. If you want examples, then I highly recommend subscribing to my own newsletter. You can go to wantauthentic. com and subscribe through there. Um, you know, myself, I take about 30 minutes each week and I sit down, I think about something that's come up in conversations with our clients recently. And then I put that in a short message. Written in my own voice, written my way. Sometimes they're great, sometimes I read back over them afterwards and I think, Oh my god, what did I create there? Anyway, I know it's hard to think of ideas. I know you don't have time. I know it's hard to be different. But I really do encourage you to push yourself, and I encourage you to just get started. You're going to see returns within weeks, I guarantee it. The other thing that I offer to you, as I've promised in previous episodes, is I'm here to help and guide. You know, if you want feedback on your email, or you just need somebody to brainstorm some ideas with, then drop me a note. You know, I'm always happy to help, and I'm not going to charge you a penny for that advice. I can always be reached at simon at domodia. com So that's all for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks for listening and don't forget to bookmark the podcast and reach out to me on LinkedIn. You know, I love to hear the things that you want to hear more about, you want to learn more about, and I love to hear how I'm helping your business succeed. Thanks very much and see you next time.