More and more brands are combining their content marketing strategy with more traditional email campaigns. As content is created and published, brands send customers links to posts and encourage them to read. It’s not necessarily a new concept, but it is one that brands are perfecting.
Apartment Therapy, an online brand that helps people make the most of their living space, is one of those brands. The company not only creates great content on a regular basis, but it curates its best stuff in a well-designed email that’s sent to subscribers.
Why are brands leaning towards newsletters? Newsletters provide a great way for a company to communicate with its audience, and it’s actually a method of communication that people prefer. Research shows 90 percent of subscribers prefer recurring newsletters to social media to receive updates about a company, and 95 percent of people that sign up find newsletters useful.
Here’s a look at a recent newsletter from Apartment Therapy:
Here’s why this kind of communication is a great addition to content marketing:
Main feature
The newsletter highlights one “main feature.” In the example above, the main feature highlights a story about a woman moving from a big home in Texas to a small apartment in Manhattan. This “main feature” is the only article that has a description, which makes it stand out.
Great images and titles
The rest of the content is simply displayed by a series of images and titles. Apartment Therapy relies on intriguing titles and imagery to draw the reader in and drive traffic to its site.
Notice some of images are specific to the article. For instance, the article, “Ashley and Ca’Ron’s Simple and Sweet Elopement at a Bed and Breakfast,” shows a picture of the couple rather than a stock wedding image. Content with relevant images like this get 94 percent more views than content without them.
Diverse content
The newsletter isn’t just full of content; it offers a coupon for SimpliSafe and a way for subscribers to follow them on Facebook.
These two options provide some variety, and show subscribers that the newsletter is about more than reading articles online; it has some cool features too.
While there’s a variety of content, it’s all showcased in the same streamlined design, which is another way that Apartment Therapy’s newsletter stands out from others.
Advertising
Brands are also taking the opportunity to make a little money with their newsletters. Many, like Apartment Therapy, are able to tell advertisers a lot about their subscriber list. They often segment their list by categories, which allow advertisers to reach a specific niche.
At the bottom of a recent Apartment Therapy newsletter, this ad was placed for the subscriber:
More and more newsletters host ads. It not only provides another revenue stream for brands, but it also increases a brand’s incentive to grow its email list.
Wrap up
Creating and publishing content can be profitable if the right marketing tactics are taken. Brands can’t publish content and hope that it’s discovered; they have to help people find it. Emailing a regular newsletter of curated content is one of the easiest and most effective ways to do that.
