For startups with limited marketing resources, it can be a challenge to prioritize which materials and channels will provide the most ROI and engagement with target audiences. For companies with complex and technical offerings, white papers and data sheets can be effective ways to share detailed product information; for other companies, a robust blog and social media accounts may make more sense.
In today’s age-of-information overload, where we’re bombarded with content, where does this leave the trusted email newsletter? Is there room for this “old school” email-marketing tool, or are newsletters something to be tossed aside as inbox-clogging spam? Entrepreneur contributor Jacquelyn Whitmore writes that some consider email newsletters as “the sad old fuddy-duddies of the online marketing world.”
Email newsletters – like any marketing communications channel – have evolved in recent years, due to the rising number of devices and media competing for mindshare, coupled with the public’s generally shrinking attention span. As a result, after fine-tuning their content and models, newsletters are thriving and many are seeing better subscriber numbers today than they did five years ago. So what are newsletter publishers doing differently? A few examples are provided below:
They speak to their audience authentically: theSkimm has more than 5 million subscribers to its email newsletter The Daily Skimm which “gives you everything you need to know to start your day.” The newsletter features the important news stories of the day and delivers a summary in an entertaining, dry and witty style.
Part of what has contributed to The Daily Skimm’s success is that it offered a new way for its subscribers (largely female millennials) to get their news, using a more digestible, easy-to-understand and conversational tone. Bloomberg notes that many media outlets covered the final presidential debate of the election, “But the tenor of the Skimm’s coverage was, uh, less formal: ‘Trump and Hillz had a night out in Vegas,’ the summary began. In Skimm parlance, ‘Hillz’ is Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump doesn’t get a nickname, though during the 2012 election Mitt Romney was known as Mittens.”
This editorial voice is far different from the formal and conservative style you’ll find on the pages of The Wall Street Journal and that’s because theSkimm’s founders know how their target audiences speak and they tailor their content accordingly.
They’re becoming stand-alone destinations for content: Publishers are learning to evolve their newsletter strategies – and are increasingly treating them “as platform-like publications themselves, designed to be read entirely in email without readers having to click through to the host’s site.”
Quartz is one news source experimenting with this approach with its Quartz Daily Brief. Gideon Lichfield, senior editor in chart of the newsletter, stated to Digiday that the business publisher “recognized that people are no longer coming directly to publishers’ sites through social media side doors, so it takes the approach that everywhere it publishes is a platform in and of itself, rather than just a way to get people to Quartz’s site.”
Ozy is another publication taking this approach. Its Presidential Daily Brief is designed to be entirely read in email and the publication is planning to do the same with its other email newsletter, the Daily Dose, according to the Digiday article.
They’re shaking up the newsroom masthead: Vox is one media company that’s been shaking up the format and model for its newsletters, and more recently, has dedicated an editorial position as “senior email editor” that will focus exclusively on the site’s newsletter program. In 2014, Vox launched its Vox Sentences email newsletter that provides “a handful of top stories with a collection of the best links from around the web … And, as the name implies, it’ll be direct — just a bunch of sentences.”
In an article from the Poynter Institute, Vox’s co-founder Melissa Bell stated, “Newsletters offer a direct relationship to readers in a platform that is necessary to a lot of people’s lives: their email inbox. So we want to have a presence there and make sure that we’re developing a direct relationship with people who like to consume our stories in that manner.”
So for startups (and established companies) looking to build out their content marketing library, the humble email newsletter may deserve a second look. Entrepreneur’s Whitmore stated that “Email marketing is still the most viable, affordable way to get your point across,” and there are several innovative newsletter publishers like those above to inspire your content and design teams.
Have you launched an email newsletter recently? What has worked for your organization? Let us know in the comments here!
Tags: Email Newsletter Filed under: COMMUNIQUÉ PR, PR trends, Strategy