When it comes to your newsletter, finding the right balance between making sure your customers don’t forget you and irritating them until they hit “unsubscribe” can be tricky. The solution is a well planned editorial calendar that helps you meet objectives, while still providing value at a frequency that’s reasonable for your customers.
Frequency
Optimal frequency varies based on your industry and the amount of messaging and content you have to share. In some cases — for manufacturers, for example—a quarterly newsletter may be enough to keep your customers up-to-date on everything you have to offer. But for the media or retail industry, you may need to send out your newsletter much more frequently. If you choose to send out monthly, weekly or even daily newsletters, make sure you have enough fresh, relevant content to share to justify sending emails at that frequency. Otherwise, you start to see your unsubscribe rate rise.
Short on resources? You can web crop new content from your website, or incorporate feeds from social media, to save on development time.
Plan for campaigns and promotions
Plan for seasonal email campaigns and promotions that run throughout the year, and adjust your newsletter schedule so that newsletters and standard promotional emails aren’t working against each other.
Make sure information being passed on in the newsletter doesn’t conflict with a current promotion, or that your email marketing schedule isn’t sending your subscriber several emails a day.
Share your calendar
Make sure everyone on your team has access to your calendar. This keeps everyone up-to-date on what’s being sent out, and helps prevent conflicts with other messaging. Also, if your calendar fills up quickly, it’ll help to have another person jump in to help produce content.
Consolidate calendars
Consolidate your newsletter calendar with other editorial content calendars, such as your blog posts and social media posts. This can also help you create content for each email by seeing what’s being published on your other platforms. You can expand on a topic discussed in your blog or write about whatever’s trending on Twitter. Keeping everything in one place is the best way to stay on top of it all.