Why Your Email Newsletter Needs A Target Audience

Email marketing keeps your connection with an audience even after they leave your site. Brands that build websites to market themselves use email lists as an extension of their strategy.

Most people who willingly subscribe to your email lists have likely found value in your website, content, and product offerings. If not, they’re expecting some value in what you have to say in the emails—and likely because you’ve convinced them so.

This post will discuss what makes an email newsletter valuable to a subscriber and how you can apply that to your email marketing strategy.

What Is Valuable Newsletter Content, And Why Do You Need It?

Delivering content that is valuable to prospective customers is the primary goal of content marketing. Instead of straightforward promotional ads, you attract people to your website by providing actionable information that they will find helpful.

For example, you create a listicle or a tutorial that users can apply and replicate to benefit themselves. Unlike a strictly promotional ad, a list of tips gives the reader more incentive to click on your blog and read your content. In return, you get traffic and an opportunity to market your brand and your products.

The same principle applies to newsletter content. Again, there needs to be an incentive to subscribe, open your emails, and stay subscribed. Of course, people are at least reminded of your brand name even when they don’t open your emails, but that’s not getting you the full benefits of email marketing.

If you keep sending subscribers low-quality content that they find no use for, they’re either going to ignore your emails or unsubscribe from your email list entirely. Effective newsletters can draw people back to your site, your products, and your blog, and you can’t convince them to do so once they unsubscribe.

What Is “Valuable” Is Different For Everyone

Content marketing is so often in conjunction with SEO because your content is a way to generate leads. You’re providing a specific type of content to attract people who are likely to buy your products.

So if you’re in the gaming tech business, you won’t be writing about health and wellness articles. In SEO, you’re optimizing to rank in keywords people use to look up specific information. This means you’re providing content for people who already have an incentive to look into the niche associated with your product. If the content is irrelevant to the products and services you provide—no matter how well-researched—you won’t be getting as many new customers.

This should extend to your email newsletters. The audience subscribing to your email lists is likely part of your content or product’s target demographic. So if you’re catering to their needs on your website, you should do the same on your email newsletters.

It goes without saying that your content should be well-researched, proofread, properly formatted, and optimized. These are technical writing basics that can contribute to the quality of your content. What’s left to do now is to capture your reader’s interest, and one way of doing so is knowing what they need.

Why You Need To Know Your Target Audience

Your target audience is the people you expect to read your content. In the same vein, they’re also the people who are most likely to buy your products or avail your services. So you write blogs and send email newsletters to attract and convince people to become your customers.

On top of follow-ups, marketing tactics, and compelling calls to action, one key factor in content marketing is delivering what your audience needs. Thus, you need to appeal to their need for what your products can provide and how your offers can directly benefit them.

For example, not everyone who looks for writing tips has the same exact need. Some people want to know how to write emails. Others want some advice on writing a school paper.

In that case, a list of generic writing tips can still help someone. However, your content is most useful when it addresses the specific concerns of your audience. People who want to write effective emails might need different tips from writing a 10-page paper.

Compared to generic writing tips, the reader will find instructions on “How To Write An Effective Email” and “How To Write A Term Paper” more helpful. It directly addresses their concerns instead of blanket tips that they can easily pull from other sites.

Now that you’ve provided more helpful information for your reader, you can market your products based on what people want. For example, if you offer a writing tool or software, content about writing school papers can communicate that your product can address the reader’s specific need. So not only is your content considered “valuable” by your target audience, it now directly appeals to their current concerns.

Tips On Identifying Your Target Audience

To create content that appeals to prospects, you first need to identify your target audience. This informs you on what you need to write, how you need to deliver the content, and how you market your products.

Here are a few easy ways to identify your email newsletter’s target audience:

1. Check Your Analytics

Which of your posts are most successful? Which newsletter topics are getting the most clicks? Which keywords are you getting the most traffic from? Doing so helps you identify what your core audience wants and allows you to infer their demographics.

2. Ask For Some User Information

Some websites ask for relevant information when people subscribe to their newsletters. For example, depending on your business and niche, you can ask for someone’s interests, the industry they belong to, how they found out about you, and why they want to subscribe to you.

Again, this helps give context to who your core audience might be. Remember not to ask too many unnecessary questions, like age or date of birth, as most people hesitate to give up private information.

3. Research Your Competitors

While this might sound unrelated, you and your competitors are likely to share the same audience.

This is especially helpful if you don’t have enough data to work with. For example, if your site doesn’t have a lot of traffic or has many newsletter subscribers, your analytics might not be a reliable way to identify your target audience.

You can look at a few competitors from the SERPs, look at their data, observe their social media signals, and build a profile of your shared target audience. And because you’re competitors, you might also want to look at the content they make and see which ones you can do better.

Bottom-line

Email newsletters are a crucial step in digital marketing. You’re extending the conversation outside of your website, allowing you to have more time to build credibility and trust with prospective customers.

A newsletter that addresses your audience’s concerns is a more valuable one. They will have more incentive to subscribe and open your emails when you send them.