Weekly Email Newsletters, Yah or Nah?

[Andy_Goldstein]

Good afternoon Marketoans,

I hope you all are having a wonderful day. I would love to pick your brains and learn from those who send out weekly email newsletters.

My team launched a weekly email newsletter in March as a way to drive traffic to our company's website, further the connection with existing leads and (hopefully) create new ones. It's short and sweet, and has a few CTA that link to the week's press release, as well as content offerings, webinar registrations, etc.

For those who do something similar:

1. What type of benchmark do you set for your open and click rates, and are you hitting those numbers or looking to improve?
2. Do you pay much attention to the Marketo Engagement Score, and if so, where do you want that score to be each week?
3. What are some of the things you do to try to get your engagement numbers up? What has worked for you?

I appreciate any thoughts you want to share on weekly email newsletters, and thanks in advance for participating in this conversation!

[Darrell_Alfons2]

This is a good question.

We do a version of a newsletter every month, depending on how much content we have put out. Much of our content is market research reports and insights as well as proprietary data from our data tool which is interesting to brand marketers.

I think if you have your content engine down and you are doing quality content at scale, it makes sense to do sort of a blog roundup or summary of all the pieces you have produced. Weekly seems a little much for me, even for my favorite blogs once a week is more than enough. Another question is who receives the newsletter? From a subscription/opt-in perspective?

Now I haven't really looked at comparative benchmarks for our industry, but I do create a campaign and track all reports and newsletters so we can see what meetings and opportunities came from them. And that is always good to see - bringing proof that the content efforts are yielding pipeline contribution.

[Devraj_Grewal]

I'm all for newsletters delivering some great new content you have put out. But I find that even with the most engaged leads in our database, which would be our customers and investors, weekly is a bit too frequent and they will begin to ignore them.

[David_Gaible]

Hi Andy Goldstein​,

Every audience is different, but I agree with some of the sentiments expressed here - once a week is too much. Start with every other week, or monthly.

Not sure your process, but I recommend you check out Digesto: RSS to email and blog subscription application for Marketo  . Great tool that is incredibly easy to set up, and it enables you to automate the sending of your new blogs posts, and/or automate combine blog posts into newsletters. Sounds like it would be worth checking out in your situation. Ping me directly if you have any questions about it!