Open your inbox wide! Bigger, go on, go on, open it wide! Now look, scan, observe ... and tell me if you see a newsletter! What? That's all there is, you say? And only a few emails from your friends or family? Well, take a better look then, damn it! What do you say? You still see a lot of newsletters?
Well, I think we have a problem. Probably a question of definition. Because in newsletter, on the one hand there is "news" and on the other hand "letter", in good French, we say infolettre or lettre d'information. Well, ok, the word "information" is a very very vague notion, and in the world that surrounds us, everything is information. But let's go on, if tomorrow I ask you to send an "infoletter", are you going to send an email with a list of promotions? Probably not, you're going to try to collect some news to format it, and maybe even put a little word of introduction. And that's exactly what I was getting at!
A long time ago, say ten years ago, most serious brands sent out a "relationship" newsletter at least once a month. Were you selling travel? Then you'd do a little focus on a destination and communicate around it (and not just the promo). You were selling sporting goods on the internet? Then you would talk every month about the latest innovations of a leading brand. You were selling clothes? Then you would email about the latest trends of the season.
And to our chagrin, this practice has become obsolete, maybe because for a while pure players were able to shoot promo, always promo without it being a problem... and then everyone started doing it.
And yet the storytelling...
What is most surprising is that in parallel, many brands have developed storytelling strategies... for social networks. With the creation of new teams in charge of social networks, advertisers are armed to tell stories and some have put a lot of resources into them. Facebook, Twitter, ... this was the top of the wave ... a wave that was organizationally speaking far from the CRM team. So this storytelling had very little influence on the content of their emails, again to our dismay.
Newsletter is back ... with more intelligence, more data, more personalization!
Before tackling the topic of the newsletter again, it is interesting to list the features that make up modern email marketing. We will quickly pass over the segmentation, AB tests and others that constitute the basis. On the other hand, in recent years, we have seen the emergence of new uses of data, such as technologies for predicting the performance of objects, the use of behavioral data, on email, but also on the web, to enrich the profile of your customers, data marts accessible to the greatest number, the possibility of influencing the content of emails in real time (even after they have been sent), ...
All these technologies, and we are far from having mentioned them all, have mainly been exploited to provide recipients with more and more promotions, always "better" promotions, ... so what to do in the context of our dear newsletters?
The easiest way is to use examples from the field. We will choose mainly one which is the newsletter "The best of 18h39" of Castorama (I could also have taken very beautiful examples of Decathlon, but it will be for another time).
Sender: Castorama
Subject: Chef's barbecue, gardening tips and soccer night at home
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Around this concept of "18h39", there is the idea that the French spend on average 18h39 at home per day (including weekends). The idea for Castorama, is to present itself as a specialist of this time spent at home, to propose DIY (Do It Yourself) solutions, reports, ... all this around 3 categories: Live, Transform, Innovate.
The concept is relayed via a website (https://www.18h39.fr/), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ... and of course a newsletter.
In this newsletter, there are NO promotions! Only inspiration, for the greatest happiness of the readers. And for Castorama, we will find many advantages to have such a newsletter:
- Create a break with traditional email communication. We are on a time of inspiration, which will perhaps conquer a part of the recipients who are not receptive to promotional emails.
- Detect areas of interest. With the clicks recorded on these emails, Castorama will be able to detect specific interests or needs. If someone systematically clicks on gardening items, this will be an opportunity to adapt future promotional communications by highlighting this department.
- Improve deliverability. Whether it is on the content that will be more pleasant for the anti-spam filters, by the better reactivity or by a decrease in spam complaints. This type of email will probably have a beneficial impact on the various deliverability criteria.
- A regular rhythm. This is unfortunately not the case with Castorama (unless I am mistaken), but establishing a rhythm (every first Monday of the month, every Saturday morning, ...) can be very interesting in order to create an expectation for fans of the newsletter (yes, it can exist)
- Self-monitoring of the list performance. A newsletter concept like this is expected to have very stable performance and can be a very powerful benchmark in your dashboards.
- ...
Here, we have listed a few advantages. Beyond that, we will also find numerous optimization possibilities made possible by the most advanced email marketing tools. On this subject, EmailStrategie's wewmanager solution offers a Business Intelligence environment allowing you to optimize your campaigns with powerful and innovative modules. Once again, we will not go back over segmentation and AB tests, which are the basis of an email marketing optimization strategy, but over techniques that are still not used enough (even if they are not all recent):
- Using transactions to guess projectsAggregates, scoring, data analysis is at the service of your content. You can understand that someone who bought plasterboard will probably need paint in the next few days or weeks. You can then push him a specific news.
- Optimization of the news order. In connection with the previous point (or possibly with other data such as web behavior), you will be able to optimize the order of the information in the email. Someone who regularly buys products related to gardening will see the news related to this subject at the top of the email, while it will be the decoration for someone else.
- Use of real time in email. Real time in email is a hot topic! For example, depending on where the email is opened, it is possible to know the weather and influence the content. In some cases, indoor DIY will be proposed, in other cases, rather outdoor activities. It is also possible to propose geolocalized content, such as a calendar of events, meeting points, ...
- ...
As we can see, the newsletter, the real one, has a lot of advantages and allows you to implement (and serve as a laboratory) techniques that you don't dare to use on your short-term emailing actions (you know, the ones that make you earn money almost immediately). But if you have to remember only one point, it is really the effect of proximity, of inspiration that the newsletter will provide to your customers. If you are experts in your field, it is essential to prove it to your customers.
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