Ever since we first used email in the place of direct mail in the old century I've been amazed by the effectiveness of email marketing. Done well, email can be a really effective way to increase the reach and readership of your content.

However, we all receive far too many emails so what are the key components of a good email newsletter when trying to demonstrate expertise online?

Timely

Newsletters by definition need to carry news - that is content about events or with opinions that are new to the reader. Clearly this is much more likely when a newsletter is sent regularly and with a short period between issues. There is of course an argument that sending too often will annoy your reader but this needs to be balanced against letting your newsletter have only old news.

Relevant

In a B2B context, a newsletter needs to deliver value to the recipient. It needs to inform the reader of something that they might not know and that will enable them to do their job better. This is the trade-off the reader makes for their time. Most authors demonstrating expertise are specialised in a specific niche. It is essential that the target reader receive information about only this niche. If a newsletter has content that is too generalised, it takes time for the reader to find the content of value to them. This may mean they disengage from the newsletter at which point your open rate falls then it does not matter how brilliant your content, it may as well have never been written.

Expert-led

To demonstrate expertise it is essential that the content be written by the expert. The construct of Content => Community => Commerce lies behind a Content marketing strategy. It is essential that the first two steps are not divorced from the third.

Drives back to your domain

Having links to articles that are of interest that are scattered around the internet may be of interest to your reader (which is a good thing). However, if they click the link, they’ll be off reading the article and no longer thinking about you or your firm (a bad thing). It is far better to host the content on your own domain so the reader is reminded of your brand and values and is very close to your telephone number or “buy” button. It’s also much better for SEO.

Anyway, I was spurred to writing this post by the calculator below. It’s a bit of fun to help quantify the money coming back from your efforts.