5 Tips for Creating Engaging Channel Partner Newsletters
You have probably heard quite a lot that email inboxes are now being overwhelmed and bombarded. There are huge amounts of newsletters out there and it’s important that you are able to stand out from the crowd. Newsletters are also a fantastic way for you to aggregate a lot of information at once so you can cut down on the idea of sending out multiple emails.
The Facts about Newsletters
Of course, as if that wasn’t enough, emails also give you the chance to relay any important information to your Channel Partners. You can tell them all about your solutions, your resources and your offerings if you want. The problem is that they are quickly losing their effectiveness. Partners are now working with up to 25 vendors at any one time and this means that they have tons of newsletters coming their way too. Vendors, customers and even solicitors can be overwhelmed at times, and this means that they are probably not going to read your newsletter if you are not providing them with anything useful. This is probably one of your greatest challenges right now, so this guide will tell you everything you need to know about newsletters and how you could do your bit to make sure that everyone is looking forward to reading the content you’re pushing out there. Even the NYT, who are one of the most established media outlets in the world, send out newsletters. They have an average open rate of 50% according to the contentmarketinginstitute.com.
How to Make your Newsletters more Engaging
Want to make your newsletters more aesthetically pleasing? Look below to find out more.
Be Aesthetically Pleasing
It’s so vital that you are able to communicate through visual communication. There is no doubt at all that the power you have to impact your user experience is high. When you look at newsletters, you will soon find that user experience ultimately drives partners to digest and read your information. Colour will provide a huge part in this. Use colours to try and get an advantage. This may be difficult at first, but if you refer to this guide of the pros and cons of different colours then there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t be able to come out on top.
Be Unique
When you redesign or rework your newsletter template, you have to make sure that it stands out. You don’t want to mimic a snail-mail newsletter and you also don’t want to be boring either. You need to be unique, use different sections to your advantage and also make sure that you are being as creative as possible in every way. With the number of subscribers potentially having an open rate of 15%, this is vitally important. Source: mapp.com.
Target Roles
Newsletters are normally sent out to multiple roles in an organisation. This does make sense when you look at the number of resources that are required to create a newsletter for every individual role. Technical engineers are most likely not at all interested in your marketing announcements and you probably aren’t interested in their work either. So what do you do here? You need to put in the work to try and build a template that has various call-out areas. You need to filter this by a role if you can and you also need to keep your design consistent. Doing this will help your reader to find out all of the information they need quickly and it also helps them to skim content that might not be essential to their role.
Some roles will have way more time for newsletters when compared to others. If you look at salespeople, then you will soon see that they are usually short on time so put the sections that they are going to need, right at the top. Technical audiences might be more detail-oriented, so they may be more likely to keep on reading until they get to the bottom. When you have gone through your audiences like this, you can then put the sections into a colour code as this will ultimately help you to establish a level of consistency.
Make it Easy for People
If you want to do your bit to try and engage your channel partners, then you have to make sure that your layouts are somewhat intuitive. Call out sections via the roles and also use strategic blocks of colour where required. This isn’t all you can do though. One tip is to look into the logistics of things. You can put a table of contents at the top or even in the sidebar if you want to organise everything. White space needs to be used so that everything is not so chaotic. Headlines, short snippets and even “read more” links can be used to your advantage more than you realise too. Images are worth a thousand words, and even they can be used to split up text as much as possible. Promotions should be highlighted, and launches should be easily picked out of the content. Making it mobile-optimised is important too. According to the Content Preference Survey Report of 2019, 44% of marketers prefer mobile-optimized content. Source: channelmarketerreport.com.
Focus on your Partners
Finally, you need to focus on your partners and what you want from them. At the end of the day, every single partner organisation is entirely unique and every vendor will have similar challenges when it comes to partner communication. With this in mind, channel partners tend to have the same content preferences as B2B buyers, according to channelmarketerreport.com.
Click-throughs, opens and various other metrics can be obtained with ease and you can also use them to your advantage in the future. They are also ideal if you want to drive engagement. Understanding all of this is critical. You have to look at which of your links perform the best if there is anything you need to do with A/B testing and even if you get more engagement at certain times. If you can create an engaging newsletter, then this will help you with every type of content you can push out and it will also help you to stay focused on relevant topics that actually end up addressing the needs of your audience.
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