Digital Campaign Tips: The Importance of Newsletters

True enough, asking people to sign up for your newsletter is difficult. However, value-adding content can make a free newsletter subscription seem worth it to your audience.

In the last few years, many marketers said email marketing has died in the wake of social networks and chat replacing the typical lines of Internet communication. However, with huge numbers of people transitioning from laptops to smartphones, email marketing has made a comeback and is here to stay with digital campaigns indefinitely.

With the rise of email marketing, newsletters made a comeback too. Many notable companies have used newsletters to increase their page views and conversion potential.

One notable example is Buzzfeed’s “BuzzFeed Today” newsletter. While it is the typical newsletter look, it accentuates on different topic categories with eye-catching headlines and interesting content. It got them about one million new subscribers yearly according to an estimate in 2015.

Another remarkable email newsletter is energy drink RedBull’s email newsletter to its subscribers. With a focus on putting their best content on top and making them stand out with an effective layout, the company gets hundreds of thousands of views per month.

True enough, this is sufficient reason to use newsletters to your advantage. However, there’s one major obstacle to overcome: how do you get people to sign up?

Offer An Easy To Produce Product With Great Value

What is an easy-to-produce product? Of course, it isn’t the products your business means to sell. One good example is videogames.

When they’re about to launch new games within the year, many videogame retailers will offer their online game with a really huge discount. Sometimes, they even offer it free of charge. In exchange, claimants must sign up for an account to their service. In turn, they get leads where they can present additional in-game content that will urge customers to spend.

This particular format is useful in email newsletter marketing. By giving something of great value to customers in exchange for information, they will consider heavily signing up for your newsletter.

If you’re finding it difficult to find an easy-to-produce product, you can offer the following:

• An ebook that solves your market’s biggest pain points
• Product discounts
• Free first month of service (if you’re a software-as-a-service business like Netflix or Spotify)
• Product online demo
• Limited edition items (which can be a bit expensive but is great if you can handle it)

The Benefits of Newsletters for Brands

Now that you understand the helpfulness of newsletter campaigns and effectively urging customers to sign up for your listing, then you’ll earn the following benefits we listed here.

• Improve Your Brand’s Awareness

In the past, people will revisit sites to find new, updated content. However, this is tedious, and the lack of new and interesting content can increase the likelihood of bounce rate and site disloyalty.

Newsletters give your subscribers enough brand information. In turn, it creates an awareness about your current offerings, the business’ overall brand personality, and how to buy or what to expect from your products.

In this way, people recall more that you were selling a useful product, which improves brand awareness in the process.

• Brand Positioning

Your website makes the first impression on most of your customers. True enough, majority of customers investigate brands and form an impression of your business. Newsletters come handy when it comes to helping your business differentiate itself.

Most customers stick with businesses that help them learn new things or add value to their knowledge. Therefore, newsletters and the content you select help you position you brand and improve your respective characteristic especially when customers compare you to other businesses in the same industry.

• Inform Clients of Your Other Products or Older Content

Often, your old website content doesn’t get much views as your new content. This is true especially if you’ve rehashed your content production style recently.

To make sure your old content get more views, update their information and data. In fact, do in-depth research into the former topic and dig up supporting data to add better value to the old content. Then, you can include them as a main feature or a sub-topic in your email newsletter.

In the same vein, you can present other less-viewed products from your roster in your newsletters. Doing this helps your clients know you are selling other products and helps urge them to do more business with you.

• Adding Value to Prospective Customers

As we mentioned earlier, subscribers will pick out quality content from your handpicked list. Getting a feel that your company aims to help and educate, customers will keep their subscription with your content.

In turn, you can demonstrate your expertise by backing it with in-depth research and analysis, effective content presentation, and partnerships with high-authority businesses and organizations involved in your product or service research.

• Contact List Development

With more newsletter subscribers, you have more listings to find qualified leads. A consistently-consuming newsletter subscriber is a viable target for purchases.

One strategy to expand your contact list through newsletters is identifying these consistent subscribers, giving them discounts and an excellent brand experience through your products and service, and finally asking them to refer other customers

True enough, you can create affiliate programs tied with your newsletters to push your referrals further. However, if these customers had a splendid brand experience, they might refer your business to others just for this reason alone.

Get Your Newsletters Ready to Go and See Your Conversions Improve!

With emails getting more attention thanks to smartphones, newsletter marketing is still a big, important thing for digital marketing campaigns. Therefore, with all the successful newsletter campaigns and benefits you can receive from a successful newsletter campaign, there is no reason not to use it to further improve your conversion rates.

The Role of Social Media Analytics In Digital Marketing

You would hear marketers tell you to “use social media” as one of your primary online marketing tactics. True enough, you already have your social network page set up on multiple fronts. You have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social networks your target audiences use. Therefore, why aren’t you racking up enough traffic and qualified leads yet? The answer is because you have never done social media analytics before.

What is Social Media Analytics?

Social media analytics is all about gathering the number of reactions, comments, reviews, and other items that help you understand more about your audience. It is inevitable some professional social media managers make things confusing by throwing a slew of incomprehensible data at you.

However, marketers with effective data presentation help you make crucial decisions fast. For example, you see that people are reacting angrily with your newest product. Upon consulting your specialist, they show you data that indicates the precise reason of your audiences’ displeasure.

Successful social media campaigns make it seem like the companies know their social network target audiences. In fact, it seems they can communicate with them deeply on another level.

The truth is these companies might have only had a small idea about their audience. For example, they might have collected their audience’s average demographic, earning power, preferences, and other factors.

The rest is about testing different social media post types and analyzing their results. Therefore, to achieve this, the companies used social media analytics.

Famous Brands That Took Advantage of Social Media Analytics

For example, Airbnb is a famous peer-to-peer rent-a-property service. Back in 2016, live streaming was a pretty new thing. While some companies were doing it, Airbnb tried to use livestream to share the unique experiences of their customers.

The company jumped into the fray with their “We Are Here Campaign.” They asked some real-life customers to livestream their activities including their Airbnb hosts.

The results were astounding. Airbnb’s social media campaign earned 6.2 million views from just 6 livestreams of real-life customers worldwide. Now, this is one proof that in-depth social media analytics can result to something really amazing.

Social media gives every company a digital beacon in a social network. In addition, it gives businesses a huge boost when it comes to other aspects of digital marketing.

While social media has no direct correlation in improving SEO scores, its role as a sales funnel entry point helps improve content visibility. To do this, most businesses share their company blog posts and pages on their social media page.

Additionally, social networks offer a pay-per-click advertising campaign that gives every post you make a visibility boost. These PPC features are effective research tools as well as for bringing high traffic to a website.

Which Tools Are Best to Use This Year?

Now that we’ve explained the power of social media networks and analytics in improving your business, it’s time to look at the best tools to analyze your social media post performance. Here are some of the best to use this year and into the future.

Google Analytics

Google’s own free-to-use social analytics tool helps you analyze both SEO and social media performance at the same time. Additionally, it gives you plenty of insights in the following aspects:

• • Website Traffic Sources from Social Media: It helps to know which platform gives you better results. This feature does that.
  • Social Media Post Milestones: This helps you monitor whether you have achieved your post performance goals over time.
  • Social Media Posts Conversations: You can monitor audience conversations for each post from every social network you register.

BuzzSummo

Paid platforms will never perform poorly (although there are some rotten apples out there). One of the best to use is BuzzSummo.

This content analytics tool helps you discover the competition’s latest achievements and the methods they used. It does this through brand monitoring, social listening, and competitor research. Here are some of its social media analytic features:

• Content Discovery: Which links see most shares in social media using tags, mentions, and comments as parameters? This feature tells that to you.
• Content Analysis: Which domain, content type, platforms, and other content formats dominate social media at a given period? This feature helps you answer it.
• Influencer Marketing: Need a top influencer to help you spread the word? You’ll find the best ones classified according to niche or industry here.

Brand24

Another paid analytics platform, Brand24 combines both web and social media analytics. First, it allows you to monitor brand-related keywords. Then, it helps you track these keywords (including hashtags relevant to you) and see their social media reach, engagement, mention volume, and more.

Here are some top features of Brand24’s social media analytics:

• Keyword Performance: Brand24’s keyword feature also extends to all possible social networks.
• Engagement Metrics: Track the engagement in each social media post.
• Influential Metrics: Check if any critic or influential authors talk about your brand locally or globally.

I Can’t Understand All These Data! What Do They Mean?

Now that you know the top three social media analytics tools for businesses, you might come across some technical terms that are difficult to understand once you start your research. These are the following:

Audience Growth Rate

This social metric allows you to see whether your social marketing efforts are yielding profit. Any business owner will want to see this summary, and social marketing manager or digital agencies will always present this to you.

The higher your growth rate, the better your digital campaigns are. Therefore, tracking this metric is definitely important.

Average Engagement Rates

Aside from the number of new social media followers, you want to see whether these new and old followers interact with your post. True enough, for your social media campaigns to work, you need to know if you’re speaking to the right people.

The average engagement rate allows you to check the time of day your posts get the most attention. This tells you more than what Facebook reactions or Twitter likes tell you about your audience when it comes to engagement.

Visitor Frequency Rate

This metric shows you the depth of engagement and strength of your social networks in grabbing the attention of your two visitors: new and returning ones.

Most of the time, you’ll want to always see new visitor numbers rise and confirm that your reach and audience show growth and profit for your campaigns.

However, returning visitors are equally valuable because they value the content they receive from your social media networks and websites. In fact, they can improve your campaigns by sharing some of your content to their networks too.

Assisted Social Conversions

Click-conversion metrics show you the efforts you’ve done to achieve a single conversion. However, it is not complete data because it doesn’t show your efforts to build trust and influence on social media.

Assisted social conversions show you additional information about these aspects. To do this, the tool follows social-media referred visitors through their journey in the sales funnel. Then, it helps you see whether they converted into other factors.

For example, a funny Facebook meme may not guarantee a sale, but you can record that you have a hundred customers who shared the post and remember your brand.

Analyze Your Social Data Correctly And See Huge Improvements Quick!

Your social media presence isn’t the only thing to help you spread the word about your business and create conversions. To fully utilize this cost-effective publishing channel, you need to know about the right data to observe helping you make the right decisions for your campaigns.