We’re so excited to introduce you to Grapefruit, the User Experience & Digital Consulting Agency that shook hands with Nestle, Renault, Nissan, and many more. They’ve joined our “Learn from” series to teach us how to sharpen our content marketing skills. After reading this article, you won’t ever underestimate your newsletter’s content power. Let’s hit the road, Grapefruit!
How to reach your audience by redefining your newsletter content
Email has become a supersaturated channel, and for users to reach your information, the message in the email subject must be convincing enough to make them want to open it. Also, you might create the best newsletter ever, but if your audience doesn’t use email, your work is in vain. What if all the effort you made when creating the newsletter can be exploited in a different way? How? Adapt the newsletter to similar media instead of email. Segment your audience, see which channels they prefer, then meet it there with the information from the newsletter.
Our company works with banking clients so we know that newsletters are important for connecting the brand and the people. Let’s deconstruct a newsletter and see how we can repurpose the content in other media and channels in order to achieve the same objective.
These are the types of information you usually include in a newsletter:
- promotions;
- new updates on your website or app;
- new blog articles;
- new products & services;
- contests;
- tips;
- insights;
Now, let’s have a look at how you can repurpose your newsletter content. Keep it all clean and simple. You don’t have to use all these possibilities once, just the ones that are appropriate for you and your audience.
Social Media carousels
Carousel format is available on Facebook, Instagram, social media feeds, and also in the social media ad section. It is a very good option to advertise your products & services. You can add up to 10 images and you have the possibility to put a different link on each image card.
Carousels are also a great way to share your knowledge or maybe some tips with the audience. It’s very easy for a user to surf through these images. Maybe they need some advice about how to save money, or maybe you have a new service and you want to help your customer by showing him, step by step, how to apply for credit. There are a lot of possibilities. The important thing is that carousels allow you to communicate with your audience more easily and in a more engaging way.
Why not split your newsletter into a series of Instagram posts? Here’s an example of an Instagram album we created to share some insights about boosting your Instagram audience.
Instead of announcing your new products, promotions or insights in a newsletter via email, you can show them to your audience directly on the channels where they are more comfortable and engaged with. Furthermore, you can reach a personalized and individualized audience by using Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn, etc and retarget the audience via their email. Keep in mind that social media carousels have a lot more reach than email. You just have to adapt your content to your target and see on which channels your brand is performing well.
Facebook Messenger Chatbot
You can start a conversation with your audience using Facebook Messenger Chatbot and send them a series of cards with your products. You have the option to customize it, including adding buttons, and your clients can take an action right away.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that private messaging is considered one of the fastest-growing kinds of online communication. It’s easy to manage, increases engagement with your customer and is cost-effective. This is also helping you build brand awareness and offer your client a good user experience. Here’s an example of a Facebook Messenger Chatbot.
Games/interactive experiences
Yes, you read that right! Turn your newsletter into educational games for your users. Let’s take a look on what the Barclays Bank did. They saw that, due to the global context, several financial frauds had taken place. So they wanted to inform the public and show them how many types of fraud are there and how to recognize them. They did this using some small, but rather interesting games. When starting a game, the user had to sound an alarm when he noticed that something was wrong. You can add this kind of game in your app or on your website.
You can easily write an article about fraud types, then share it as a newsletter via email. However, with a little bit of imagination, you can create more engaging and useful content, as Barclays Bank did. Not only did they help the audience, but they also built trust.
Interactive content is more engaging for the user and holds their attention. Evergage says in a study that 87% of marketers reported “a measurable lift from their personalization efforts”.
Wickret banking site is a great example of how to use personalized and interactive content to catch your customer’s eye. They deliver a personalized banking experience through an intuitive mobile app and they are also applying to become a national bank.
When you first land on the homepage what you see is the brand tagline and some graphics flying around. Then, when you hover over the text the font color changes. It has a very modern style. This is what will make the user think: “Mh.. this website seems interesting, I want to see more”. Now the customers are starting to scroll down the page and the magic is happening. They begin to truly discover the website through the amazing interactive experience and, simultaneously, they find out about the banking app and about the benefits it offers.
After the first scroll, the user already understands what the website is about (promoting a banking mobile app) and what it contains: the customer can access all their cards, he receives helpful stats about his monthly expenses, a lot of helpful graphics for a better understanding of what he spends on, advice about money management, and so on.
Then the benefits are showing up, each one explained in detail.
The Wickret mobile app is pretty nice, but to convince the people to download it, they first have to catch the user’s eye. An interactive experience is a sure way to get it. Take a look by yourself: https://wickret.cuberto.com/.
Website customized content
Another way to repurpose your newsletter content is by splitting the information in different areas of your website and customizing it.
If you want to properly customize your content according to your audience, try Intercom, a conversational relationship platform that shows you who is using your product or website.
A banner on your website is the classical method. How about taking a whole newsletter and placing it on the right side of a page that has high traffic? While reading a very catchy article, your user may be interested in your newsletter displaying some new services. Here are some examples of this implementation from AdEspresso by Hootsuite and Business Insider.
Another way to share your newsletter on your website is as an infographic. An interactive one is even better because it can grow the engagement! It is a great solution to show your customer the benefits of a service or product or maybe to just illustrate a step-by-step process to help him.
You can also share some newsletter content through a pop-up. This kind of feature can be customized in such a way that it is displayed to the user at a certain time. For instance, it can be triggered when a user has scrolled twice on your site’s homepage or after reaching a certain page. You can inform the people about new promotions or maybe you show them the ultimate update of the website so that the user can find what he needs more easily.
Mobile application
In the last five years, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 51.53% of global website traffic, according to Statista.
So a mobile application is worth your attention. Most probably you already have one, that’s why we will tell you how we repurpose newsletter content at Grapefruit when it comes to mobile apps.
Push notifications
Push notifications allow you to send messages on the mobile app or directly on the browser. You can notify the user about promotions, last updates, financial insights, new services, alerts, and so on. To do so, you need to use a Push Notification Service.
Why should you choose push notifications instead of email to communicate with users? Because push notifications have an opening rate of 90%, which is 50% higher than the opening rate on email. Withal, 60% of users agree to receive notifications on their smartphones and 40% of users actually interact with the notifications in the first hour after receiving them. If you want more interesting statistics about push notifications, check here.
Specific sections
Identify the interests of your audience and create specific sections in the application like offers or insights.
Create a specific section where the users can see all your promotions, campaigns and rewards. If you have some partnership, show your client where he should use your card to gain some rewards. Gather all these offers into one single section on your website or app. In this way, your user has all the information in one place and he knows where to go if he is interested in something.
Share your insights with the customers in a specific section in your app or website, instead of sending them via email (the email may remain unopened; also, if the user opens the email, he will not be able to have all your insights together, but scattered through the inbox). In these sections you can share weekly advice, statistics about his expenses or maybe tips about money management.
Latest updates
You want to give the user a pleasant experience while he is using the mobile app. That’s why you are constantly improving it. An elegant way to inform users about the latest updates in your app is to display a popup with all the news when he opens it.
People are always reading the updates section in the App Store and in the Android Play Store for the apps, so if you make a really good update you could write a better description, not just about the bug fixes and updates you made, but rather about what features you added or tell people something about your offers.
Google Programmatic Displays
Split your newsletter and give it another look with Google Programmatic Displays. Through this feature you reach your audience while they surf the internet. What is really amazing about it is that you have the possibility to segment your audience in a very refined manner which means that you can create even more personalized content and gain even more engagement from them.
There are several formats to choose from: image, audio, video. You already have the templates, just populate them with your content.
When it comes to Display & Video formats, you have the following options:
- Panorama: you have 3 slides moving horizontally on which you can add text, images, and a button;
- Cuecard: you have 3 frames scrolling down;
- Blank Slate: it’s your choice if you want to keep it as a static image or if you want it to look like a gif.
All the possibilities are optional, you can combine them as you wish.
Let’s pretend you have a new product: a program people can enroll in to make a loan. You could create a newsletter with all the details and inform people via email. However, as I was mentioning at the beginning of this article, you cannot be sure that users will see the email, open it, then engage with it. If you are wrapping the newsletter content into a programmatic display, your information will be more visible. While browsing the internet, some targeted users will see your new product and will click on it, landing directly on your website.
Webinars
Conduct webinars to share your industry knowledge. For instance, you can do a webinar about savings or one in which you announce the latest updates of the application or website (when you make a bigger release).
Remember!
When repurposing newsletter content consider these 4 essential steps:
- Set your objective, what is the message you want to share?
- Who do you want to hear the message? Segment your audience.
- Which communication channels do your audience segments prefer?
- Wrap the message according to the channel and your audience. Adapt the newsletter to the interests of the audience segments.
This doesn’t mean you should just stop using email newsletters at all. There are still pretty amazing options like email marketing automation, transactional emails or AMP for email.
There are just more appropriate options for you to share your newsletter information in a manner that will reach your audience in a more efficient and engaging way.
Ancuta Ciocoiu
Ancuta Ciocoiu is a Content Marketing Manager at Grapefruit. She creates content strategies, website campaigns, writes a lot, and comes up with creative ideas for clients. She likes to see things from a different point of view and she thinks that there is a solution for everything. Wanna get in touch with her, you can contact her on LinkedIn.
