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Create a ROI-Driving Partner Experience5 Things Every Channel Partner Newsletter Must Have
Email newsletters may not be the latest, state-of-the-art mode of communication, but it is still a powerful method of communicating through your channel, especially because of its ability to generate amazing ROI. A 2021 survey on email marketing showed that for every dollar spent on email, marketers were able to generate $36 – that’s 3600%!
Now, imagine every single one of your partners achieving that sort of return. This is why it’s so important to send out regular communications to your partners. Besides increasing brand engagement, it also ensures that your partners have the information they need to send updates to their customers.
The key thing to remember about newsletters is that they have to provide valuable content, which can come in a variety of formats including articles, infographics, product sheets, videos, and more. You can also use these newsletters to reinforce messaging and position your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Tracking your partner newsletter performance
When gauging the success of an email newsletter, there are a few key email metrics you can track. Some of the most important ones include:
Deliverability Rate
This is the percentage of emails that were successfully delivered to a recipient. An email can bounce due to many reasons; such as a full mailbox, an invalid email address, or a server issue. If you have a high bounce rate, it can indicate that your email list isn’t very healthy and that you may need to clean it up.
Open Rate
This is the percentage of subscribers who open your email. It’s generally measured by the number of opens divided by the number of emails that were successfully delivered. Open rates can vary depending on a variety of factors, such as the content of the email, the time it’s sent, and how often you send your newsletter.
Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is how many unique subscribers click on a link in your email. If your CTR is high, that means your content is highly relevant to your email recipients and they are interested to learn more about what you’re sharing. Another way to measure engagement is to track how often the newsletter is shared – through forwarding and/or social media.
The goal for your newsletters is to achieve higher deliverability, open, and click-through rates. How can you achieve that? Here are five things your partner newsletter program should have:
1. The Right Target Audience
Not all your partners will be concerned about the same issues or interested in the same products. When you sign partners up, you need to segment them so that they only receive information that’s relevant. This will help to improve your open and click-through rates.
You can segment your audience by demographics, engagement, psychographics, firmographics, and stage in the partner journey. If you have the analytics, you can use insights from data to further optimize this.
2. Curated and Personalized Content
This means tailoring the content to be relevant and useful to your partners. If your software is advanced enough, you can go beyond simply customizing the person’s name. To start, let your partners choose topics and products that interest them the most.
You can then optimize further by tracking newsletter open, click-through, and share rates to find out more about the content your partners are engaging with – so you can send more of what they want and are sharing. This helps to increase engagement.
3. Localized Versions Of The Newsletter
If your products are being distributed globally, remember that not all your partners will be selling in English. For partners who sell in countries where English is not the first language, it’s important to localize your newsletter so that they can easily share content to their customers, without having to put effort into translations.
Localizing your newsletter can have a big impact on engagement – for example, one of the strategies that Siemens Digital Industries Software used to double their partner newsletter engagement rate was translating their content into local languages.
4. Great Email Design That Follows Best Practices
While design might seem like a superficial matter, there are still best practices to follow if you want your newsletters to perform. One of the first things to consider is the subject line – make sure it stands out to your audience. This is the first thing that captures their attention and makes them more likely to open the email.
Second, make sure your email size is not too large. This can cause the email to load slowly, which leads to deliverability issues and possible spam complaints. You also want to make sure that your email width can fit within smaller screens (like mobile devices). This ensures that partners can easily view the content no matter where they are. Third, use typography and readability to make it easy for partners to skim the content. and quickly get the information that they need.
5. The Optimum Send Time
Send your channel partner newsletters at the right times, in the right cadence. If you send them too frequently, you can cause email fatigue and partners will be less likely to read them. But if you don’t send them often enough, partners may not see the value in subscribing to your channel partner newsletter.
Timing is also key – you want to send your newsletters at a time when your audience is most likely to engage with the content. This might mean sending them later in the day when people have more time to read them, or scheduling your emails based on time zone. Use data to inform your decisions about timing and frequency.
A single platform to manage all your partner communications
Email is an incredibly effective method for communicating with and engaging partners – but only if done right. As a channel manager and brand owner, you want to ensure your messaging is standardized across all your communications, but you don’t want to just blast the exact same content to every single partner.
Imagine if you could create a bespoke newsletter for every single partner. With Impartner News on Demand, you don’t have to imagine – you can make it happen. The best part is that the whole process can be automated.
With News on Demand, you can create templates so your emails stay on-brand, set time zones and languages for delivery, and allow preference selections so partners can choose what matters most to them.
Find out more about how you can increase partner engagement. Request a demo.