As we have goals set and growth plans are discussed, many of the agencies and the digital tools get to the point where it will be decided on one method of improving the clients, it might be through the newsletters.
Certainly there are some genuine reasons for this as there are also several great examples of excellent digital marketing newsletters you can subscribe to.
However, the question here is, what is the strategy?
Why do some of these newsletters exist? It is not ideal to remove out a constant stream of company blog posts that appear to be written by the virtual assistants with minimal industry knowledge. That won’t work.
What type of content is needed?
Specifically in some medium, the creative use depends entirely upon the target audience and the psychological triggers that your audience will respond to. First, decide who your target audience would be. For most digital agencies and tools, this is not difficult at all, and I can cheat a bit because I am typically targeting some of the same buyer persona’s, such as the readers of Digital Agency Network. For an easy job let’s classify the buyer persona as either an owner or an executive level in (or overseeing) the marketing function.
Bench Press 2021 Agency Report
For instance, you can take a look at the results from the UK’s largest survey of independent agency owners.
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What does this buyer need? This is the same response as one of the favorite answer to most SEO questions: it depends. If the buyer that you are targeting is more than the end practitioner, then the content in a newsletter needs to be geared towards those in the weeds such as what is given by Aleyda Solis’s.
The target audience that we are focused on, however, are the overseer of these functions. What’s important to them? They do not have time to try and understand the nature of most of your technical pieces and with this they need a broader overview of the information that can be discussed or acted upon at a higher level in order to either increase revenue, decrease costs, save time, or to stay focus.
So, why should digital agencies start a newsletter?
There is an importance for the email marketing even for those agencies that do not offer email marketing as a service. When done appropriately, email allows for multiple touch points, but more importantly it allows an agency to establish itself as an expert voice.
Furthermore, email is a marketing channel that is less volatile when compared to the organic search and paid social media, as most marketers can testify to it.
Email is also an easy funnel entry point that is really smooth. As far as you are providing value in your newsletter in exchange for the email, funnel churn can be used and allows for a simple contact mechanism when it is time to move a bit closer to purchase.
A new genuine approach to incorporate a newsletter marketing strategy has to do with the paid “search and social“; all these emails can be used as a primer for your retargeting and your lookalike audiences.
Another reason is cost: Mailchimp, Send Grid, and most the email platforms are extremely cheap when compared to other acquisition channels, making the barrier to entry close to nonexistent for even the most bootstrapped digital agencies.