How to Master Email Marketing for Periodicals

You’ve built your digital edition and have users converting into subscribers on your website. What’s next? Email subscribers are key to growing your publication, however, many publishing companies fail to take advantage of their large lists of email subscribers.

Many periodical niche publishers only use email marketing to inform their subscribers about their new content, however, this simply isn’t enough. In order to grow a successful email marketing program, you should be sending emails at least once a week and learn how to engage your audience in order to serve your users better. Email marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways to monetize and promote your content. You’ll either need to learn how to master your program — or hire someone to do it for you.

What’s the Importance of Email Marketing for Digital Publishers?

Email marketing is essential for digital publishers. When used correctly, email marketing:

• Drives targeted traffic to your website: When you want to drive traffic back to your website, emails remind subscribers about your content and provide a direct path for them to stay digitally engaged.
• Is affordable: Email marketing doesn’t have to come at a huge cost. In fact, it’s found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, publishers can generate approximately $38.
• It can be tracked: You can get deep insights from your marketing campaign like what your users are interested in, where they are clicking, and what they are consuming.
• Generates brand awareness: You’ll stay engaged with your users, and can promote and sell products or subscriptions without breaking your marketing budget.

So, now that you know how important email marketing is for your digital edition, how do you get started? Use these tips to master your email marketing program.

Send Emails Frequently

In order to engage your audience on a regular basis, it’s important to send emails to your subscriber list on a regular basis. Instead of just sending out reminders of your new publication, there are many different types of emails that you can work into your editorial calendar.

One of the most important email templates is a promotional email. Promotional emails can be sent weekly, or twice a week, and include advertisements. Not only will this promote important products and services to your audience, but it will raise revenue for you.

Promotional emails can spotlight your advertisers. Be sure to include a strong call to action and customer testimonials or social proof.

An example of the weekly editorial calendar could include one-two promotional emails, mixed in with daily newsletters promoting your content. Of course, you should test and monitor your email mix to see what works best for your audience.

Track your Email Campaigns for Periodical Publishers

Tracking your email campaigns is essential, but how do you know what to track? Here are some good KPIs to get started:

1. Click through Rate: This is the percentage of email recipients who click on a link within a given email. You can find it by dividing the number of total clicks by the number of delivered emails, then multiplying by 100.
2. Conversion Rate: Once someone lands on a given landing page and completes the desired action this is known as a conversion rate. The conversion rate could be tied to purchasing a product, filling out a lead form, or placing a call to the business. You can find it by dividing the number of people who complete the action by the number of total emails delivered and multiplying it by 100.
3. Bounce Rate: Similar to a bounce rate on a website, the bounce rate for emails is due to the number of total emails that could not be delivered to an individual’s inbox. This could be due to a wrong email address, an inbox that is too full, or the email is simply nonexistent.
4. Track Growth of your Subscriber List: You’ll want to see how much your subscriber list is growing, so it is essential to track the growth rate of your list.
5. ROI: Calculating the return on investment is important for determining how successful your email marketing campaign is. To find your ROI, take your sales and subtract the money invested in the campaign, then divide by the money invested in the campaign and multiply by 100. This will show you how to calculate your ROI.

Focus on Micro Audiences

Personalized emails are the best way to ensure the right content gets to the right audience. The best way to do this is to target emails with contextual content. In fact, this can drive up to 77% of your overall email ROI. Using behavioral dynamic response marketing takes a lot of thought and consideration, but tagging and using automation can help.

Apply specific tags to each of your subscribers, based on location, what source they came in through, interests, and more will allow you to segment your audiences and develop content specific to their needs. Developing hyper-relevant content to those who are most interested in it, will make your audience more engaged.

You can even create email drip programs that encourage people to complete a specific action, based on the actions they’ve already taken. This could be content that encourages them:

• To open your email if they haven’t in a while.
• Convert on site, especially if they’ve clicked through a number of times but haven’t taken the next step.

How to Automate your Email Marketing Campaign

While creating a successful email marketing program can be time-consuming, automation can be put in place to ease the process. By putting in place rules and a tagging structure, you’ll be able to follow your use through their journey and send them highly targeted messages based on the actions they have already taken. For example, some of the automation you can put in place are:

• Automation based on clicks and opens: Maybe you want to send fewer emails to less engaged contacts and more frequently to engaged contacts.
• Automation based on the contact’s behavior: Serve up content they are more interested in to keep the user engaged.
• Automation to re-engage inactive subscribers: Deploy a re-engagement campaign to get inactive subscribers engaged again.
• Automation after they submit an opt-in form: Don’t forget to email your user after they have taken your desired action. Whether they’ve signed up to receive emails or additional content, you’ll want to confirm that they’ve taken the right step.

Hiring an Expert to Get More from your Email Marketing

If you’re not taking the full advantage of your email marketing for your online magazine, it may be worth hiring an expert to do it for you. This way, you won’t have to worry about setting up drip programs, segmenting your audiences, and coming up with a complete marketing automation strategy.

Flip180 Media has years of experience coming up with successful, well-designed email marketing programs that are designed specifically for the periodical publisher. Key products that we have created, such as Magazine Portal and FlipStats, give us deep insights into how your audience is engaging with your digital publication so that we can develop you a successful email marketing program.

If you would like to learn more about our services and how we help create successful email marketing campaigns for online magazines, get in touch with us today.