Newsletters & Email Marketing for Customer Retention

Not only do newsletters deliver fantastic ROI (3600%) but they are also excellent for customer retention.

Whether long or short, frequent or not-as-frequent, opinionated or factual, a customized newsletter speaks in the voice your audience wants to hear and broadens its space in the market, building brand recognition and community.

This post will look at the origins of newsletters, get into some facts about their effectiveness, and then explore why they are so powerful and how they can work best for your business. 

What exactly is a newsletter?

Today’s newsletters use digital means to share regular, valuable brand information with subscribers, but they have their origins in mid-15th-century Venice. Subscribers received handwritten letters twice a week with information of events. Later, sixteenth-century merchants used them to keep track of taxes, exchange rates, and other business updates.

Though they sometimes offered curated content, newsletters usually contained brief reports of general news. In fact, they gave rise to newspapers as we know them today!

Benjamin Franklin was a pioneer of the newsletter by sharing information about goods and services in newspapers, which helped position those brands and strengthen their relationships with existing customers.

Newsletter and email marketing facts

The following facts from Email Is Not Dead demonstrate that email marketing is THE most effective strategy for retaining customers.

• More than 4 billion people use email. That figure is growing at around 4% per year.
• 66% of consumers have bought something online as a consequence of receiving an email marketing message.
• Four out of five online shoppers in the US are more likely to make additional purchases after receiving emails based on their shopping preferences or behaviors.
• Seven out of ten consumers prefer businesses to contact them by email.
• More than half of customers like to use email to save important information from brands.
  
• 35% of customers open most of the marketing emails they receive. 14% open all of them. Many do so to check for special offers.
• Even when consumers delete promotional emails, they’re more likely than ever to open them first.
• Marketers have consistently rated email as the most effective marketing method for brand awareness, converting leads, acquiring new customers (40% better than Facebook and Twitter), and customer retention.

Why email newsletters are so effective

1. They reach your customers where they are

If you’re not reading this on your phone, it’s likely to be nearby. 

More email opens occur on mobile (61.9%) than on desktops (9.8%) and web clients (28.3%).

Email is mobile. So — unlike a TV or radio ad, a billboard, or a newspaper column — an email newsletter reaches customers wherever they are, whenever they are ready. 

2. They remind your customers that you exist

Imparting information through a newsletter is an excellent way to establish your brand and keep it in your customers’ minds.

3. They show that you understand your customers

A newsletter that addresses your customers’ questions, concerns, and needs shows that your business cares about them and can deliver on its promises, too.

4. They help you learn more about your customers

Email newsletter traffic doesn’t need to be one-way. They can invite questions, suggestions, and comments, whether informally or in a poll. 

Newsletters provide excellent opportunities for gaining insights into your customers.

5. They help solve your customers’ problems

Understanding your customers puts you in a good light. Solving their problems really gets their attention. 

A business’s ability to anticipate its customers’ needs depends on its maturity and the prowess of its marketers. 

A skillfully-executed newsletter is a great way to demonstrate how your business can help your customers.

6. They share news about your company

Customers expect brands to maintain a presence online. In fact, they increasingly prefer businesses that align with their values and they’ll subscribe to a newsletter to find out more information.

Just like Benjamin Franklin, your business can use newsletters to share information about your company, including recent hires, objectives achieved, new goals, and content based on your core values. 

7. They are exclusive

Email marketing is an opportunity to reward subscribers with special content unavailable anywhere else. 

This is one of the best ways to build a fanbase that helps market your business.

8. They help position your business

Whether your business is starting out or changing direction, disseminating your style, attitudes, values, and goals via newsletters helps people understand who you are and where you stand in the market.

9. They have an engaged audience

Your newsletter readers have opted in. Almost everyone on your subscriber list is genuinely interested in some aspect of your brand.

Even if they only sign up for freebies, they are demonstrating interest in freebies from YOUR brand.

10. They improve customer retention

A customer is for life, not just until you get their first invoice.

Too many businesses neglect customer retention in favor of chasing down new leads, resulting in an overwhelmingly salesy approach that becomes impersonal and drops customers like they’re too hot to hold once they’re through the sales funnel. 

Newsletters show that your business prioritizes customer relationships over transactions.

11. Their success is measurable

With many marketing methods, it’s difficult to tell whether they’re working or not, especially when you’ve employed several techniques or channels simultaneously.

Email newsletter marketing, however, provides comprehensive, clear stats to measure progress and profit. 

The top key performance indicators (KPIs) to track are as follows:

1. Email opens
2. Clickthroughs
3. Conversions
4. Bounce rate
5. List growth 
6. Email forwards
7. Social shares
8. Unsubscribes
9. ROI

What makes a good email newsletter?

✔️Engaging content

Engaging content starts with understanding your customers and developing a content strategy. For example, a small investment company might lean toward daily reports on breaking financial news, while an international charity might prefer to share less frequent but more in-depth reflection on social issues. 

When it comes to the writing itself, customers expect professional, well-written content. 

This means expressing concepts clearly and in line with the brand voice while avoiding grammatical errors and typos. But it also means appreciating and applying some fundamentals of writing for digital media. Crafting headlines that inspire people to click, for example, is an art and science all of its own. 

Whether your newsletters are primarily entertaining or informative, they are best when people look forward to receiving them. 

✔️Segmentation

While the concept of an ideal customer is useful, most businesses don’t really have one type of customer. Various kinds of people tend to pay for a firm’s products or services. 

With some observation and data analysis, businesses can normally hone in on a few types of customers that like the brand the best. 

Email marketing can make the most of this information with personalized content for different segments. 

Of course, this means that more writing is required, but we find the technique invaluably effective for customer retention because our writers “talk” directly to customers and show them they are valued.

✔️Exclusivity

Copying Facebook posts and dropping them into email format is not a winning strategy for customer retention.

A newsletter can share the same ideas and information as shared in other marketing venues, but with unique email content, receivers are more engaged and feel more valued.

Creating unique content for multiple platforms is time-consuming – when done properly. But the results make the work worth doing with utmost focus and dedication. That’s why we always create personalized content without cutting corners.

✔️Thought-out content

Email marketing stats ramp up the pressure to deliver newsletters according to a consistent schedule. Publishing consistently IS vital, but sacrificing quality to meet deadlines can be harmful to your reputation. 

Newsletters perform better when it’s clear that thought went into them. 

Our content writers don’t have the pressure of running a business. We just take over providing great content that customers love on a schedule that works best for them. 

✔️Objectives

Whether you are sharing a new product or service, looking for feedback, aiming to improve profits, or work on customer retention, make sure your goals are clear. 

We love to develop laser-focused briefs with our clients. These help us keep content tight and deliver more consistent results. 

This way, our writers use every word to move your businesses toward its key objectives. 

Conclusion

Marketing via email newsletters is powerful, dynamic, and exciting!

Its fantastic ROI has got the attention of most business owners and marketers.

Creating email newsletters that achieve their potential requires:

• A strategy
• Consistency
• Determination
• Skill

With writers that understand your brand and care about your audience, email newsletter marketing can help your brand grow and flourish.

Talk to us about your vision for your business. We’d love to learn more about you and suggest ways our newsletter-writing service could simplify your marketing and amplify your results.

Written by Dean Edwards

Dean lives in Southern France but was born in the UK, where he studied business and IT, and earned a degree in Writing. When he’s not creating content, he’s writing fiction, making music, and practicing martial arts. This is part bio and part affirmation.