Email Marketing Strategy: 7 Tips for Reliably Increasing Your Newsletter Subscriptions

Email is a highly effective form of digital marketing, but it's only as good as your newsletter subscriptions. And your newsletter subscriptions are only as good as your email marketing strategy.

The stats are encouraging. Visitors to the New York Times are twice as likely to become paid subscribers if they join a newsletter first. The Globe and Mail increased retention rates by 140% with an email re-engagement program. And 51% of B2C marketers assert that email is their largest source of return on investment.

Various organizations, from Fortune companies to digital media agencies to mid-size consulting firms, are reaping the benefits of this growth. Yours could be one of them.

The information overload experienced by today's consumers holds an opportunity for email marketers to attract subscribers with the curated, consistent content that they crave. But before you take out your wallet for the nearest online marketing agency, consider what you are capable of doing for your business.

To accomplish this, we have assembled BluEnt's top seven tips for gaining quality subscribers.

• Create Intuitive Click Paths

  Consumers won't subscribe if you don't give them a reason to, so don't rely on pop-up opt-in forms on your website for an influx of newsletter subscriptions. Instead, take a look at your site analytics.

  Click path data gives you valuable insights into user goals, interests, and knowledge that align with your email marketing strategy. Placing an opt-in hyperlink on pages where people look for content related to your newsletters will help you gain quality subscriptions.

  For example, say your company runs a webpage dedicated to seasonal discounts, but there are no current discounts to post.

  Instead of leaving the page void of content, you could inform visitors that subscribing will provide them with email alerts whenever a new offer becomes available. Placing a link to an opt-in page here would be highly effective!

• Make It Responsive

  BluEnt hasn't spent years perfecting our mobile-friendly newsletter templates for no reason. According to a study by IBM Marketing Cloud, 48% of emails in Canada are opened on mobile. The remaining 52% are divided between webmail and desktop, at 27% and 25% respectively.

  As a result, responsive email design usage has increased greatly.

  This is no surprise, since responsive design allows you to seamlessly integrate images and text in your emails to attract newsletter subscribers, regardless of what platform they use.

  This is potentially tricky, so you can reach for a reliable digital marketing company if you're wondering how to go about it.

• Keep It Organized

  Subscribers don't often spend more than a few minutes scrolling through your email, so every second counts. A logical, user-friendly newsletter will help your preserve your subscriber list and attract others by word of mouth.

  The first step to organizing your newsletter is to divide it into clear sections. Use distinct headers, borders, and different blocks of color to let readers process the different sets of information intuitively.

  Separating elements is particularly important for newsletters that contain diverse content. If a subscriber is only interested in following new job openings, a consistent sidebar entitled "JOB BOARD" will be much appreciated.

  To make this process easier for you, BluEnt designs and creates HTML5 newsletter templates as part of our email marketing services. They allow you to quickly swap in the latest company news and updates while maintaining a visually appealing yet systematic newsletter that is tailored to your business needs.

• Keep Email Marketing 90% Educational, 10% Promotional

  This advice was coined by HubSpot, and here at BluEnt we couldn't agree more. Spending every word of your newsletter pushing sales will cause your audience to tune out, resulting in a string of unopened emails and dwindling subscriptions.

  Educational content can be described in three ways: enlightening, relevant, and timely.

  Today's consumers are bombarded with new information daily, and a newsletter that condenses those updates into a digestible selection of content is bound to attract subscriptions.

  Canadian non-profit organization BookNet, for example, is excellent at creating well-rounded, informative newsletters. Each weekly email includes a section titled "BookNet's Reading List", a series of the latest online articles relating to the publishing industry.

  This curated selection lends the organization credibility and gives readers a reason to open their newsletters week after week.

  Feeling a bit lost? A digital marketing service could be of use to your business.

• Concise Copy is Key

  A newsletter is not meant to be an isolated reading experience. Every good newsletter sends the reader somewhere else.

  Be it a pathway to your website, purchase page, or blog, the goal of the email is to persuade readers to click through and engage with another type of content. In other words, newsletter copywriting does not serve to educate subscribers – it serves to entice them – fast.

  However, convincing copy is not a skill that can be learned overnight – it takes years of practice.

• Create Clear Calls-to-Action

  This about harnessing the power of your audience. If you give a potential customer a good reason to convert – and by following the above steps, you will – they will not only be willing, but eager to support you.

  The only thing standing in the way is how you design your calls-to-action. It is natural for email newsletter marketing to contain multiple CTAs relevant to different pieces of content, but it is important to design a clear call-to-action hierarchy.

  In particular, aim to have one CTA stand out from the rest. According to the Harvard Business Review, giving readers too many options results in them not picking any options at all.

  Therefore, strategically plan out the look, size, and placement of your CTAs so that it is clear which one you want subscribers to follow the most, which ones they should follow if they have time, and which you have prioritized the least.

• Make the Content Shareable

  Give your readers every method available of engaging with your newsletters. This not only increases your brand awareness and attracts new subscriptions, but also gives your customers a sense of community and involvement.

  NextDraft is an expert at this technique. Rather than assuming that all readers will reach the social sharing options at the bottom of their newsletters, they include these options throughout the email newsletter design immediately following each piece of content.

  That way, subscribers feel motivated to share the individual stories they connect with.

  And there you have it – seven ways of guaranteeing more newsletter subscribers, all while building quality relationships with your customer base.

  BluEnt's email marketing services give you content that uses creative graphics and multimedia to communicate information and grow your brand.

  Ready to get more loyal subscribers with a tried and tested email marketing strategy? Contact us now to jumpstart your newsletter!

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