A newsletter is a well-known powerful communication tool. If used right, it can support a healthy communication flow between relevant parties. Today, businesses and organisations all over the world are constantly taking advantage of the benefits of newsletters to keep stakeholders informed.
There are a plethora of tools for creating newsletters but one of the more popular ones is Mailchimp – an all-in-one marketing platform that helps to automate email interaction between a brand and relevant stakeholders. The platform’s approach to communication focuses on healthy contact management practices, beautifully designed email campaigns and powerful data analysis.
How do you use Mailchimp for effective media relations?
Personal also always works
The first thing to do is personalise the emails. With the barrage of emails, one of the quickest and simplest ways to get someone to open your email is to personalise it. You can use people’s first names in the email subject and introduce the email with their first names as well. Mailchimp makes it easy to include specific information (like the first name).
Know your audience
Make sure you organise your audience, and that you know your audience and what works. One of the important things to note while sending newsletters is that the message has to be crafted for a specific audience. The media for example cannot be placed under one audience segment. Media contacts have to be segmented into various beats such as Health, Education, Business, Entertainment and more. Sharing information meant for one audience with another will only prove ineffective.
Content calendar
There’s a popular saying; ‘in consistency lies the power’. Using newsletters to reach your media contacts once in a while will not guarantee the best results. If the goal is to share information with your audiences once a month, it should be consistent. If the approach is to reach them once a week then you need to be consistent with the day and time as well. This allows your media contacts to subconsciously expect communication from you on that specific day. With Mailchimp, you can aid the process by scheduling your newsletters before time and have them delivered to your audience segment on the dates pre-set by you.
A captivating subject headline
As much as the content of the email is relevant, the subject must be captivating. It is estimated that an average of 121 emails is sent and received daily by an individual. This gives your media contacts the hectic task of selecting which should be opened and which should be ignored.
A captivating subject is simple, straightforward, informative and also relevant. The recipients should get the idea of the email content from the subject. This compels them to open it and moves them to digest the content.