We’ve all heard that creating and sending out a newsletter can provide many benefits for a business or organization looking to boost engagement and build relationships with an audience.
However, producing an effective newsletter requires a substantial time investment in order to create valuable content, build subscriber lists, and analyze performance.
Startups, which are usually short on time and staff, are starting to wonder if it’s even worth it, and the answer depends on whether it aligns with your content strategy.
In this article, we’ll explore the key considerations around newsletters, including the time investment required, measuring effectiveness, and alternatives you may want to consider instead. With the right information and priorities, you can decide if creating a newsletter is the best use of your limited content resources.
What is a newsletter?
Before deciding whether or not a newsletter is worth the effort, it’s important to understand what a newsletter is, what the potential benefits are, and what key factors need consideration regarding the required time and resources.
A newsletter is a regular communication sent out via email or print to subscribers. It provides information or news related to a particular industry, company, brand, or topic. The goal of a newsletter is to build ongoing engagement and loyalty with an audience.
Newsletters can take different forms – from simple text-based emails to elaborate, designed layouts. But the unifying factor is that they offer subscribers curated content on a regular schedule.
Potential benefits of newsletters
Some of the key potential benefits of newsletters include:
- Increased brand awareness and reach
- Lead generation and sales opportunities
- Building relationships and loyalty with customers
- Establishing thought leadership and industry expertise
- Driving website traffic and online engagement
By providing subscribers with valuable, relevant content, a newsletter can become a trusted source of information that readers eagerly anticipate.
Key considerations
Producing an effective newsletter requires a substantial time investment. Without dedicating adequate time and resources, newsletters often fail to reach their potential. Some key considerations include:
Time Investment Required
Creating and maintaining a newsletter is an ongoing commitment that takes a significant amount of time. Initially, you’ll spend several hours planning and strategizing, setting objectives, frequency, target audience, themes, and content topics, possibly including some research.
You’ll also need to review and adjust your strategy every six months, dedicating time to review and make sure you stay aligned with evolving business and audience needs. This continuous effort is crucial to keep your newsletter effective and relevant.
Content creation
Researching, writing, editing, and proofreading unique newsletter content requires a minimum of 4 hours per issue. This time investment increases if you want to include things like interviews, polls, contests etc.
For a monthly newsletter, expect to spend 10+ hours creating content each month.
So, before compromising yourself with a newsletter be sure you have the capacity to consistently generate high-quality content that aligns with your newsletter’s objectives and resonates with your target audience.
Design and formatting
Creating newsletter templates from scratch can take a considerable amount of time, especially if you’re not familiar with graphic design software. If you’re looking to make your newsletter visually appealing and professional, you might want to consider investing in a graphic design tool or hiring a designer, which will also add to the overall cost.
Additionally, formatting your content within the newsletter template, adding images, charts, and other visual elements can be time-consuming. But consistency in design and formatting across all issues is crucial to establish a recognizable brand identity, so ongoing attention to this aspect is necessary.
Building your list
Building your list of newsletter subscribers is another essential consideration. This process involves not only collecting email addresses but also ensuring that you have a quality list of engaged and interested recipients. You’ll need to set up opt-in forms on your website, social media platforms, and other relevant channels, and actively promote your newsletter to attract subscribers.
Regularly cleaning and managing your subscriber list to remove inactive or unengaged contacts is vital for maintaining a healthy list and optimizing email deliverability rates. This maintenance task requires periodic attention, which adds to the ongoing commitment of managing a successful newsletter.
In total, launching and maintaining a quality monthly newsletter requires 20+ hours of effort per month as an ongoing time investment. The workload is frontloaded during launch and template creation. But high-quality content production and audience building are long-term commitments.
Measuring Effectiveness
Newsletters can be a great way to engage your audience and promote your business, but only if done right. Here are some key metrics to track in order to optimize your newsletter and determine if it’s achieving your goals:
Open and click-through rates
These indicate whether your subscribers are actually opening and reading your emails. Benchmark against industry averages – aim for above 20-30% open rates. Analyze which email subjects, sender names and calls-to-action drive the most opens.
Subscriber growth
Look at how many new subscribers you gain each month. Is your list growing steadily? A healthy rate indicates your audience sees value in your newsletter. Promote signup forms across your website and social media. Offer incentives like discounts or exclusive content to convert readers.
Engagement analytics
Tools like Google Analytics let you see subscriber behaviors like click-through rates on links, time spent reading, and scroll depth. Identify your most engaging content based on metrics like shares, comments and clicks. Find out which topics resonate best with your readers.
Lead generation and sales
Ultimately, you want to drive conversions from newsletter subscribers. Track how many convert into leads by filling out contact forms or sales from special promo codes. See if targeting subscribers with specific offers boosts conversions. Measure against other campaigns to determine ROI.
Continually A/B test newsletter content and layouts while tracking key metrics over time. This will enable you to refine and optimize your strategy to keep providing value to your subscribers.
Alternatives to Consider
Other lower-commitment options to reach your audience, like social media, guest blogging, etc.
Social media
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow you to reach large audiences organically. However, with so much content, it can be difficult to stand out and convert followers into customers. You also rely on the platform’s algorithms.
Guest blogging
Guest posting on industry blogs gets your content in front of engaged new audiences. This exposure and backlink building opportunity leads to more website traffic and subscriber sign-ups. However, you rely on others to provide the platform and readership.
Video content
Video content on YouTube, TikTok, etc. lets you demonstrate expertise and build trust through sight, sound and motion. But high-quality video production demands significant time, skills and resources. Viewer attention span is short.
Conclusion
Creating and sending out a newsletter can provide value, but also requires a significant time investment. Here are some key considerations on whether it may be worthwhile for your business:
- Newsletters allow you to directly reach your audience and keep them engaged. This can be very useful for customer retention and driving repeat business. However, it does require consistent, high-quality content creation.
- For companies with interesting insights, news and announcements to share, a newsletter can be a great format to distribute that information. But it needs dedicated resources and effort to produce consistently.
- With the rise of social media, free platforms like Facebook and Twitter provide alternatives to reach your audience. Though organic social media reach can be limited, paid advertising options are available too.
- Transactional or promotional emails sent to your customer base directly can also serve a similar function to newsletters, with less overhead.
Overall, newsletters can provide value but require resources to create. They work best for companies with truly unique content worth subscribing to. For other businesses, social media or transactional emails may fulfill their needs. Consider your goals, resources and audience to decide if starting a newsletter is worthwhile. The commitment required is not to be underestimated.
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