Lead-Nurturing with Effective, Attractive E-Newsletters

By Steve Jones-D’Agostino and Joanna Bittle

E-newsletters are one of the most effective lead-nurturing tactics because they allow you to position your company as a thought leader and stay in your prospects’ minds on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. They are also a cost-effective way to reinforce your company's positioning in the marketplace and update your staff on internal news.

To get people to read and appreciate your e-newsletter, you must provide effective, attractive content – also known as “valuable” content. Because “value” is in the eye of the beholder, you first need to know your target audience well. Once you’ve done that, do the following:

• Produce target-appropriate content. Usually, B2B content can contain more “trade talk” and be written at a thought-leadership level. Effective B2C content, on the other, tends to be about more popular topics.
• Produce useful, interesting and timely content. Self-promotional pabulum will cause readers to tune out quickly – and quite likely relegate your next e-newsletter to the trash bin.  Instead, make sure your content is timely by talking about current issues and trends.
• Produce attractive design and layout. Content may be king, but design and layout are queen. You can have the best articles ever written, but they will most likely fall on blind eyes unless your e-newsletter is attractive and user-friendly. Keep your look simple and elegant and avoid using every available font. Make creative use of white space and refrain from filling every nook and cranny with text or images. Because you always need to think about your recipients, include both HTML and text-only versions.

In the May issue of CommCreative’s e-newsletter, we highlight four of our key clients and the work we’re doing for each of them: developing an effective B2B campaign for a retail client; launching a new product for a technology client; creating a downloadable file that explains a health-care client’s product features and benefits; and building an e-commerce website for a medical-devices client.

We also promote a recent half-hour radio interview with our chief marketing officer regarding the use of online social media, which contains a link to audio of the interview. And our CMO promotes an upcoming “Social Media and E-Marketing Seminar,” which CommCreative is sponsoring and Worcester Business Journal is hosting on June 2 from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the Courtyard Marriott in Marlboro.

Blowing our own horn was certainly a key reason to include this content. But if that’s all we had done, we would have failed miserably.

We also drove readers to the CommCreative website, when appropriate. Remember, your site is a passive medium. Unless you push people to it, they may never visit. Sort of like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest, with no one around to hear whether it makes a sound.

Once you’ve produced and sent your e-newsletter, you need to measure its results. Who opened it? What was the open rate? Which content was the most popular? 

This way, you can both adjust your future e-newsletter content and calendar and obtain great market intelligence for use in future marketing plans.