Newsletters offer the best return on investment
Newsletters are highly effective and cost-efficient marketing. Get the most out of your newsletter campaigns with our expert advice.
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. According to Litmus, newsletters are unmatched when it comes to ROI (return on investment). We are talking up to 36 times the effort. If you spend one krone on email marketing, you can expect 36 kroner in return.
The stability of email contributes to its strong performance
Newsletters have a clear advantage compared to social media: They are not governed by algorithms. Meta continuously introduces new algorithms that affect visibility and social media, and marketing trends are in constant flux, while email has stood firm as a rock since the beginning of the internet. You are the sole owner of your email lists.
The requirements for consent in marketing legislation also mean there is a closer alignment in email marketing between the recipients' interests and the topics presented to them, compared to social media. With good email marketing, you are well-positioned to build a strong bond of trust between sender and recipient.
5 reasons why email marketing is more effective than social media
Newsletters are low cost and high utility. It is easy to measure the effect of your mailings – how many open them, how long they read, who clicks the links, and how many bounce. Newsletters help keep your company visible and top-of-mind with customers, and they help drive additional sales.
Newsletters in different formats – which ones fit best?
There are different types of newsletters. The best fit depends on your type of business and what you want to communicate. And perhaps more importantly: What your customers care about.
To send good and relevant newsletters you need to know your customers. Here are some of the most common newsletter formats:
Campaigns or offers
If you have campaigns or offers on products or services, this is highly relevant to your recipients. This is perhaps the most common newsletter format and the one proven to deliver the highest ROI of all marketing initiatives.
New products and services
If you have something new and exciting to offer, tell your customers about it. Those who have bought from you before or shown sufficient interest to be open to a purchase are a great fit for this type of newsletter. How else will they find out what is available?
Surveys
Surveys in newsletters work well for two reasons: They help you get feedback and they let the customer express themselves. We like to feel involved, and you can often get participants to voluntarily share information or contact details you can use to make more targeted offers. Win-win. But remember to ask for consent to use this information.
Company news and updates
This is primarily about the company and the people who work there. Have you secured new customers? Partners? What are the employees doing, and who are they? These newsletters help build a community between you and your contacts, giving the company a human face. It is also an excellent way to communicate company values and your direction.
Curated articles and resources
By signing up for your newsletter, contacts can receive weekly updates on articles and other resources you have published. You can also build unique emails featuring highlights from the week or month. If your company has a blog, this is a great way to share updates.
Write about your company's field of expertise. A good example of this kind of email is Helt Digitalt, which summarises the week every Friday morning with updates on social media, among other things.
When are the best sales days of the year?
What should the newsletter contain?
Do you find it difficult to create newsletters that both engage and convert? Don't worry. Here are our best tips to get you started:
1. Clear objectives for the newsletter
What do you want to achieve with the newsletter? What action do you want the reader to take after reading it? Answering this makes it much easier to decide on both the content and the conversion points you need. A conversion point is, for example, a call-to-action button or link.
Increase sales
Build awareness of a new product, service, or brand
Increase traffic to a specific landing page
Create engagement in other channels with a Facebook competition or similar
Other types of conversions, such as downloading a report or registering for a webinar
2. The subject line is the newsletter's superpower
This is without doubt the most important part of all. If the title does not grab attention, no one will open the email. Keep it short and catchy so it can be read in full on mobile. Often 30 to 50 characters is ideal. Use a call to action or a question. Avoid looking spammy by skipping exclamation marks, discount percentages, or capital letters. Emojis work well, but consider your audience.
Personalisation: Show that you know your customers. Use their name, location, wish them a happy birthday, or tap into interests and preferences you have gathered from previous interactions.
Relevance: Connect with current trends and events, such as seasons. Your customers are likely also focused on national holidays, Christmas, or summer holiday preparations.
Storytelling: Learn from online news sites and how they convey the essence of a story in just a few words. Sense of urgency: Create the impression that an item or offer is only available for a limited time or might sell out quickly.
Offers and discounts: Most of us like to make a good purchase. This in itself is a strong sales-triggering message, as long as you do not overdo it.
3. Engage in a few words
There are many different theories on how long the text in the subject line needs to be to achieve the best conversion rate.
ReturnPath is one of several companies that have tested this in recent years without being able to prove a correlation between the number of characters and the actual open rate. What we do know for sure, however, is that more and more people check their email on mobile. Just think of your own usage habits!
Therefore, it is crucial to design your newsletters with smaller screens in mind. We recommend keeping subject line text to a maximum of 50 characters to ensure the message gets through.
4. Create high-converting content
The hallmark of a good newsletter is that it feels relevant to the recipient. The theme should ideally stem from the customer's life, needs, and challenges, aiming to solve these in the best possible way through the products or services your company offers.
You know best what your customers care about. Are there, for example, questions that customer service answers repeatedly? Articles with concrete tips and advice are a great starting point. Newsletters featuring "How to..." angles also tend to have high open rates.
In addition, it is important to choose themes that align with your profile and what you actually want to sell. If you run an online furniture store, it is natural to write about interior design and decor trends, but perhaps not about the weather or politics.
5. Newsletters can be both long and short
Your message and objective determine how long your newsletter should be.
If you want to share discount codes or showcase new products and services, you should in most cases keep the text short and to the point.
If, on the other hand, you want to build your brand and relationship with your customers, you can afford to use more and longer text. Combine different content to show the breadth of your company profile.
Keep to three to five different elements in the newsletter, depending on what you want to communicate. Too many products or a long list of articles makes the layout cluttered and less tempting to click on.
6. Design and interactive elements
If you want more than just text, images, and links, you can add interactive elements to the email. This can be anything from GIFs to menus, slideshows, and shopping carts. Done right, your newsletter can become an engaging mix of features that make it attractive and fun to interact with – like a mini-website in itself. The challenge is that these newsletters might not work in all email clients or can appear cluttered.
Speaking of cluttered – ensure a clean design when creating your newsletter. Give elements room to breathe and use headings and images strategically. Make the most important parts largest or most prominent so the eye easily understands where to focus. Use fonts optimised for newsletters – email clients only support a few select fonts (click here to see which ones).
Think about what your company wants to communicate and find an expression that supports it. If you are serious and high-end, a black-and-white aesthetic with elegant images can work well. If you are more playful, you can add a GIF and bright colours. To create a clear identity, it is a good idea to use the same colour palette and fonts as you do on your website and other official materials. You want to maintain the company profile in your emails too, ensuring recognition and reinforcing your brand identity.
7. Call-to-action (CTA)
Do not forget that every newsletter has a goal. Always include a CTA, meaning a button or link prompting the recipient to take the next step. This could be answering a quiz, downloading free content, or buying something in the online store, to name a few options. Think about what you want to achieve with the newsletter: sales, sign-ups, gathering information, or nurturing the customer relationship?
The CTA button should be the most enticing part of the email, so ensure it looks good. It is usually wise to link it to a dedicated landing page focused solely on the action you want the reader to take, increasing the likelihood that they will follow through.
8. Optimise your newsletter
One of the most important success criteria for email marketing is that you continuously optimise your newsletters based on what works for your specific customer group.
With an A/B test, you can easily compare different versions of your newsletter. If you have a large email list, you can run an A/B test on a small sample first, then confidently send the best-performing version to the rest of your list.
It is easy to get carried away with A/B testing, but avoid the temptation to test everything at once. Best practice is to test one element at a time, such as two different versions of a subject line or an image. That way, you know exactly what caused the difference in results.
While it is always disappointing to see customers leave, you should not make it unnecessarily difficult to unsubscribe from your newsletter. The main rule is that unsubscribing should be just as easy as signing up. You can ask for the reason for unsubscribing, but do not make this feedback mandatory – you risk only annoying your users.
Segmentation – different content for different audiences
Instead of sending the same generic email to everyone on your contact list, you should use segmentation. This means dividing your list into different target groups, so only relevant content is sent to them. This saves you from sending irrelevant information and increases open rates by making the content more relevant to the reader.
Segmentation – from beginner to professional
You can segment based on anything you know about the subscriber – from industry, location, interests, website behaviour, gender, or age. Dividing your readers into groups based on interests or demographic variables can do a lot for your marketing. This allows you to tailor what you send to, for example: [female, 30, marketing manager] and [male, 50, CEO].
Newsletters and privacy
To send out newsletters, you need to build quality email lists, and contacts must provide their information voluntarily. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) makes it illegal to store information that is not given with explicit consent, and this includes email addresses.
You should therefore make it appealing for your readers to opt-in to receive information, which can be done in several ways. A common strategy is to have a sign-up form or popup on the website, especially if you have a blog they can subscribe to. Otherwise, you can offer incentives with discounts, free (and valuable) content, a Christmas calendar, or a quiz where results are sent via email. If readers feel they get value in return for their email, they are naturally more willing to share it. Ideally, the newsletter itself should also be of interest.
Make puts privacy first and stores all personal data in Norway
When should you send the newsletter?
Almost as important as the content is finding out when and how often to send it. You want recipients to get the newsletter at times when they are receptive to opening and reading it, but when is that? You also need to find a balance in how often emails are sent. Send newsletters too rarely, and customers will forget you. Send them too frequently, and they will perceive it as spam.
When should you send newsletters to achieve maximum effect?
When it comes to promotional emails, over 85 per cent of respondents want to receive them at least monthly, while just over 60 per cent want them at least weekly. You can use this as a starting point when planning your send frequency, but remember that the more tailored the content is to the target group's interests, the more receptive they will be. Waiting a week or 14 days between sends allows you to gather more valuable information into a single email, increasing its overall worth.
It is difficult to give a definitive answer on the best time to send. The best approach is to test different times and see what your customers respond to best.
However, we do know a few things. Generally, Wednesday is the best day, followed by Tuesday and Friday. Saturday and Sunday consistently score lowest on open rates, but convert better once the email is actually opened. Remember that this data is heavily influenced by the type of product or service you sell. B2B products often see better results on weekdays when people are in work mode and more receptive to that type of content. B2C, especially leisure-related, will likely perform better during weekends.
Open rates will also vary based on external factors. Fewer people will open your newsletter on a sunny summer day than on a rainy Wednesday in November. So while statistics are a good indicator, do not rely on them too heavily.
Common issues when sending newsletters
As with most technical solutions, you may encounter certain issues with your mailings. What are the most common challenges?
The newsletter is bounced
If your newsletter "bounces," it means it was returned for various reasons. A soft bounce means it reached the email server but was returned because the inbox was full, the server was down, or the email was too large. A hard bounce means the email address does not exist, and you should remove it from your database. A remote bounce means the recipient's server accepted the email but returned it, for example due to a spam filter.
What is a bounce, and what is the difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce?
Out-of-office autoreply
Automated replies, or autoresponders, are related to bounces as both send an email back to you. In this case, however, your email did reach its destination, but the recipient has set their client to reply automatically, for example to say they are on holiday or using a new email address. Although it can be some work, it is important to read these so you can update your database or hold off on the next email until the subscriber is back at work.
The newsletter ended up in the spam filter
The last thing you want is to end up in the spam folder, and the easiest way to avoid this is not to spam. Yet it happens too often that legitimate marketers end up there because they have not followed correct protocols. In the worst-case scenario, your IP address and domain can be automatically associated with spam and blacklisted entirely.
Some common tips to avoid this include using descriptive, honest subject lines, including a working unsubscribe link, and removing inactive users. If a large portion of your user base never opens your emails, internet service providers will take notice and are more likely to flag your newsletters as spam.
There are also security protocols – SPF, DKIM, and DMARC – that help verify that you are indeed the sender you claim to be. This builds trust with the recipient's email server, minimising the risk of your newsletter ending up in spam.
The newsletter is marked as spam
Sometimes recipients will click the spam button when they receive an email from you. Many who use free services, like Gmail, use this feature to unsubscribe. If this happens, you should first try to determine why the email was perceived as spam, especially if multiple recipients react this way. Secondly, you should remove these contacts from your list immediately. This keeps your lists clean, consisting of people who are genuinely interested, and helps you avoid ending up on ISP blacklists.
Why is your newsletter flagged as spam?
Relevant content is key
The better you match the recipient's interests and consumption habits, the more interested they will be in receiving your newsletters – and the better the results. Segmentation, personalised messages, and automation will help you get there.