How to Create a Distributor Newsletter Your Partners Will Want to Hit Send On
Email newsletters are a well-known, tried-and-true method of reaching audiences no matter where they are and helping you keep them in the know. Containing a variety of valuable content and relevant information, effective distributor newsletters are an invaluable tool to keep your distributor partners in the loop and strengthen your brand.
When gauging the performance of an email newsletter, it’s essential to look at several key metrics. High deliverability rates, open rates, click-through rates, or website visits are clear markers of a successful newsletter, as those checkpoints indicate that your email is being received, read, and considered. Similarly, low email bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates show that your emails are reaching the correct audience.
Additionally, a high number of forwards and social shares also indicate that audiences believe what your newsletter is saying is worth passing on to others. To further encourage sharing, you may even want to consider creating newsletters centrally so that it’s easier for your partners and distributors to share!
But how do you make it so your partners will want to forward your emails? Here are five ways to make your email newsletter more shareable:
1. Target the right distributors
It’s no secret that segmenting audiences so they only receive relevant information can boost campaign performance tremendously. If your email isn’t relevant to the recipient’s needs or interests, it must fight an uphill battle to get the recipient’s attention before it is even opened.
By segmenting your distributors using criteria such as demographics, engagement, psychographics, and firmographics, you can be more certain that you’re sending the right information to the right target group. And when a recipient is already interested in the topic of your newsletter, it has a better chance of being opened and read.
2. Curate and personalize content
But it’s not just about the audience – the message matters too. Having the right content and ensuring that your newsletter resonates with the recipient can motivate them to engage with the content of your email.
Data is essential for determining what topics resonate with your audience. When writing an email newsletter, look at previous email metrics: what topics were the most successful for a particular segment of distributors? Figuring out what worked in the past will provide valuable insights into the kinds of content you should be creating and distributing.
A newsletter that provides value is likely to lead to more shares, resulting in better ROI on each email you send out.
3. Localize your content
Localization refers to the process of adapting content or services to the culture of a target audience in order to reduce the barrier to entry. For example, your partners may sell in languages other than English – hence, having newsletters available in different languages would make it much easier for distributors to share your content without having to translate it for their own customers.
There may also be additional benefits to localization. By tweaking your newsletter to a target market’s culture, you make your message easier to access, understand, and share.
Learn more: See how Siemens doubled their partner engagement by localizing their newsletter.
4. Follow best practices for email design
It should come as no surprise that effective email design is paramount to making your email newsletter perform the best it can. Fortunately, marketers who learned from trial and error have narrowed down best practices for email design over the years.
Firstly, subject lines are a recipient’s first impression of your email. A good subject line isn’t too long, is relevant to the content of your email, and is attention-grabbing. Besides that, it is also essential that your email is as accessible as possible. This can be achieved by optimizing the email file size for faster loading, ensuring that it can scale for screens of different sizes on mobile devices, using typography for readability, and making your email easy to skim.
Learn more: Use templates in News on Demand so your partners can easily create beautifully designed, completely customized newsletters that are on-brand.
5. Send emails at the optimum time
When sending out your carefully crafted email newsletters, you’ll want to maximize the chance of them being read by sending them out at the correct times and intervals.
Send your emails out when your distributors are most likely to engage with the content. For example, someone winding down after dinner is more likely to check out an email notification than someone waking up in the morning.
Additionally, make sure you aren’t sending them too frequently. Flooding a recipient with newsletters creates email fatigue and makes them more likely to mark your emails as spam. Giving the recipient a grace period of a few days to a week will give your audience room to breathe and ensures that email fatigue doesn’t build up too quickly.
Lastly, use data to inform your decisions. Refer to previously sent newsletter data to determine which sending times were most effective. A trend will often indicate an opportunity to optimize.
Communicating with distributors can be easy
With these simple tips, you’re now equipped to create a newsletter that effectively conveys information and makes it more likely for your distributors to share it with others.
There’s an easy way to ensure every single one of your newsletters are optimized – at scale.
Check out Impartner News on Demand, a newsletter platform that delivers targeted and personalized newsletters to every user. With this platform, you can create hundreds of personalized emails that will get the right information, to the right partners, at the right time. Find out how you can empower your email marketing efforts – request a demo.