Why your newsletter should have (some) content they can't see anywhere else
If your newsletter is just an index or archive for your other marketing channels, it might start struggling
I have seen some brilliant content creators pull the pin on their email newsletters. They had great videos on their social media platforms or good articles on their blogs but felt their email just wasn’t worth the lack of traction it was getting.
I’d agree - their newsletters mostly sucked! I preferred the content they were putting elsewhere.
You shouldn’t just clone the exact same videos or posts on every single social media platform, you should vary the content to suit the audience of each platform.
That’s not to say you can’t post any duplicate material, but no effort at all to cater to each audience just makes them feel like crumbs from your table.
By the same token, you should be giving people a good reason to sign up for your emails.
Do not — I repeat do NOT just use it as a round-up of the content you have posted everywhere else.
You know the newsletters I mean; just a series of links to click and nothing exclusive in the email.
Consider these:
The famous “The Hustle” newsletter which has millions of subscribers, was exclusive to email and went viral because of it. The story was inside of the newsletter.
They were seeking to make you happy to read it inside an inbox, not force you to go to their blog because “that’s what’s best for SEO”. Their writing style reflected that. They wanted to make it so good you would forward it, not so stuffed full of keywords that a search algorithm would be appeased.
I forwarded it to many people, and had many people forward it to me, saying “have you heard of this I read it every day you should sign up”.
Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, included exclusive-to-email content in their newsletters and they were awesome. Little write-ups from him.
What an idiot, right? He of all people should have known better! There is nothing evergreen that people can keep looking at if it’s stuck inside an email from days gone by!
Well… maybe not, but evergreen and eternal isn’t the only benchmark for successful content.
What about FOMO? If people know it can only be found in a particular place, they look out for it, because they can’t just amble onto your blog at a time that suits them.
Email-exclusive content is a way to incentivise people to open and read your email all the way to the bottom, because they also can’t just say “oh I already follow them on LinkedIn, I won’t be missing out on anything by not opening this email”.
Chris Orzechowski, the founder of an esteemed email copywriting agency, suggests using email as a way to test content before publishing it elsewhere. Why? Because you can see very quickly how it performs.
You can A/B test different subject lines and the best performing one becomes the new title of a lead magnet (the thing you download off a website in exchange for your email or content details), blog post, or even an advertisement.
Anything, really! The thing about content is what you (person-inside-of-the-business) thinks is going to resonate with your audience or turn into sales, is often a dud.
And the thing you whip up and think will be a dud actually spreads or turns into sales. It is madness!
But by testing via email first, you can see… did people open it more or less than usual? Ok, the subject line is great/sucks.
Did they click on any links or reply to a P.S so that we can tell how far down the email they read (much cheaper than investing in website hotspot tracking software)? Ok, the content was gripping/dry.
Did anyone reply? Ok, you got live feedback… whereas the public element of social media can keep people silent, and the login to comment element of a blog can turn readers off bothering.
Got a bunch of unsubscribes on the same day? The material might have been irrelevant or offensive.
Got a bunch of new subscribers the same day? Awesome, the email likely got forwarded.
Got bunches of both subscribes and unsubscribes and enquiries on the same day or the following day? PERFECT, the people who are a fit for your business resonated with your content, the people who were never going to buy left, and your messaging or copywriting was bang on.
Now, take the emails that perform the best and adapt them to live a second life as evergreen or campaign content. It’s the perfect way to take the overthinking out of writing a sales page, funnel, e-book, or blog.
Are you in business to sell stuff? Close deals? Get contracts signed? Cos stats for emails converting into a sale still cast a big shadow over social media.
It takes more trust for someone to sign up to emails than it does for them to passively follow on socials. So, they are warmer. They might not want pitch after pitch, BUT they do expect to hear about your offers, and they are more ready to pull out their wallet than the passive social followers or the still-cold SEO researchers.
In that case, why would you just send them in a loop around all your other content channels? They signed up. They’re more ready to buy here than there.
Redirecting them is as frustrating as calling a customer service line and getting passed from one department to the other and enduring crackly hold music. You just want to solve the problem, can they make it easy, please!
In conclusion, stop overlooking the best performer in the room. That would be email ;)
Give it the spotlight for just a couple of months and see what happens!