Enjoyed by customers and employees alike, a company newsletter is your brand’s chance to provide updates, showcase successes, highlight products, and discuss the future. Too often, much time and effort is invested into a newsletter without proper plans for redistribution.
Maximize the value of your newsletters by creatively repurposing them. First, how is the value of newsletters determined?
Calculating Value for Your Business
While not an exact science, the value of a company newsletter can be measured by comparing total reach (i.e. number of readers) to project cost. If a newsletter costs $100 to produce and only reaches 100 people, you’ve spent $1 per reader. However, if the same newsletter reaches 1,000 readers, you’ve reduced cost per reader while gaining more conversion opportunities.
Value for Readers: A Checklist
Of greater importance to your brand’s staying power is a newsletter’s value to its readership. Whether you’re writing for an internal or external audience, ensuring the content is valuable and relevant to readers should be your top priority. Use this checklist to evaluate whether or not you’re creating newsletter content with readers in mind:
· Are you meeting a need or solving a problem?
· Are you targeting a specific audience?
· Does your newsletter present newsworthy information?
Before investing time and effort making sure a larger audience sees your content, confirm whether your content speaks directly to your intended audience.
4 Newsletter Strategies Guaranteed to Maximize Value
When the goal is to see improved results without investing too many additional resources, it’s possible to keep content “working” for you by presenting it in a different form. To create a win-win situation for all involved, consider implementing different techniques to vary exposure and encourage opt-ins.
· Create a digital magazine. Particularly if your newsletter is initially published in print, scanning it into PDF form and republishing it online is a simple way to make your content more accessible to readers while increasing the potential for heightened brand awareness. One company doing this particularly well is Empire Agriculture. By creating a quarterly digital magazine, Empire Agriculture benefits from enhanced online visibility and lead generation while providing content readers find valuable.
· Include social sharing buttons. When newsletters are in digital format, adding social sharing buttons makes it easier for readers to share (and thus increase visibility of) newsletter content. For marketers, it’s more efficient to give readers a chance to share at first contact with your newsletter than it is after the fact. A popular e-commerce company, Supplement Warehouse, adds social sharing buttons to all scheduled digital correspondence. By encouraging social sharing, the company is able to start social conversations that lead back to their website and potentially more sales.
· Develop a newsletter archive. In addition to building links on your website, creating a newsletter archive is a great way to offer readers yet another chance to subscribe to your content without spending a significant amount of resources to do so. AllRecipes, a popular online database featuring user-submitted meal ideas, makes use of dated newsletter content on a dedicated page containing links to past editions. While adding value to the site and providing relevant content to readers, AllRecipes is efficiently reusing content to gain better results.
· Publish a SlideShare presentation. For B2B companies, SlideShare can be one of the most influential platforms on which to publish newsletter content; however, it is often underused by marketers. Maximize the value of newsletter content by taking the most poignant pieces of information and developing a digital slideshow. Content Marketing Institute is known for utilizing SlideShare’s potential to reach thousands of followers, and often repurposes newsletter content or company-owned studies on SlideShare to enhance sharing and reach.
By reframing existing content, your brand is able to connect with more people while simultaneously engaging followers online. With well-positioned calls-to-action, you’ll gain more followers, leads, and conversions without creating more content. As a bonus, the more social signals and links leading to your company’s website may positively affect your site’s position in search engine rankings. Landing on the first page (preferably in the top 5) can lead to double or triple the amount of traffic and attention your brand receives.
Do What Works for Your Audience
Ultimately, the strategies you use to promote, distribute, and repurpose newsletter content will depend upon customer behavior and preferences. Creating a SlideShare presentation might make perfect sense for a B2B company, but a growing online retail store may not enjoy the same exposure because the target audience has completely different interests. When it comes to maximizing the value of newsletters, first do what works for your audience, then focus on what works for your business.