Crafting Newsletters Your Audience Actually Wants

You may ask why bother crafting newsletters nowadays? Are newsletters just more annoying emails you constantly receive from websites you have forgotten existed? Well, let me tell you, they are, in fact, quite powerful tools to keep your audience informed and engaged with your activity… when done right.

It is a strategy in and of itself, where goals, audience and content are brought together to create a newsletter tailored to the company and the audience’s needs.

The goal

A newsletter serves to keep your audience updated and informed. What are the goals, however, behind this communication strategy? Here are a few:

• Staying connected with your audience
• Keeping your audience engaged
• Enforcing your brand values

The audience

Your audience is at the forefront of your emailing strategy and depends on it. Defining your audience begins with the creation of your persona, an imaginary character representing a group of people. Depending on your project, you might need to think about different personas and how to adapt your strategy to meet their expectations.

But how to create your audience profile?

• Describe your audience and put together a socio-demographic portrait.
• What are their objectives or the problems they may encounter?
• What is already available to them on the market?
• How do they behave?
• What are their frustrations / their aspirations?

Careful now, these elements must be defined through careful research and interviews. Juxtaposing your own expectations and preconceptions can be counterproductive, or just wrong. Nonetheless, these steps are applicable to all kinds of communication strategies (social media, print communication and so on), but let us keep in mind that the targeted community of your newsletter already knows you.

The content

Once you have established your goals and target audience, you can think about the type of content to share through your newsletter.

Let us say that you want to communicate with your clients and that your goal is to increase their engagement with your products. In this case, your newsletter will provide, for instance, information about new articles and functionalities, an exclusive promotional code and/or a CTA (call to action) to redirect your reader to your website or social media.

Now, what type of content could you share if you want to communicate with your employees/colleagues? A few things come to mind. Your newsletter could share the new piece of software your company is going to implement, it could also be the occasion to welcome new staff members, highlight ongoing projects and the teams conducting them, and share new technologies or apps to optimize workflows.

Your newsletter also needs to be visually pleasing and engaging if you want your audience to interact with it: add pictures and use a combination of fonts in line with your brand to you easily identifiable. In short, consistency and coherence are key to remaining credible to your audience.

Newsletters need to be thought through. Determine your goals, identify your audience and provide engaging content tailored to meet both your objectives and your community.

Image: Brett Jordan on unsplash

Further reading: Dans la peau d’une assistante de communication