Top 5 Newsletter Software Features of 2024
Newsletter software to help send and manage newsletters and subscribers is a great way to keep people engaged and loyal to an organization. They have changed a lot since the first iterations, using manual processes in email software to send HTML documents masquerading as newsletters. Email newsletters are a way of creating a loyal group of engaged subscribers that eventually turn into a profitable investment. It’s about establishing and growing a relationship; not a series of sales pitches.
Organizations need to develop an engagement-first strategy, delivering valuable and helpful content. This drives engagement, and in turn, sales. How does a business do that? In part, it’s using modern newsletter platforms that give tools to create high-value messages that get opened, read, and actioned. Here are the top features of Newsletter Software of 2024 and how they can help your organization.
1. Tailored and Segmented Content
Marketing is increasingly about personalization, and for good reason. Not everything appeals to everyone, and there are huge differences between individuals. An example is twin sisters who live at home with their parents: same age, gender, location, but one likes pink and sparkly apparel, while the other enjoys black and muted colors. The same marketing does not apply.
Using advanced segmentation based on device, location, and on-site behavior allows much better targeting of users. Content can be personalized to ensure it’s relevant and provides value to potential customers. Marketing isn’t about selling, it’s about building relationships, and there’s no better way than showing a customer that the business knows exactly what they want.
In 2024, there’s not only far more effective, holistic, and educated data collection, but machine learning (ML) algorithms that can advise on customer pain points, motivations, and preferences.
There’s also the ability to provide specific personalization to individual customers based on their previous interactions and viewing history. This goes beyond remarketing, into hyper-personalization. Not only can the business target based on age preferences, income level, and location, it can also be tailored to individual tastes. So while acknowledging similar purchasing power of the teenage twins, the marketing is highly targeted with specific appeals to their style.
Data points collected include:
Demographics
The basics of age, gender, education, income, and occupation provide broad brush strokes for characterizations. This gives basic guidelines, such as age distribution, that allow organizations to provide content that meets customer needs. Also consider additional demographic features like income level. In this case, luxury products have to be marketed to customers in a certain way while affordable options that are more budget-friendly for others are marketed differently.
Purchasing Behavior
People have different routines and behaviors. For instance, someone might spend the morning on your website, browsing for what they want to buy, but then login from home in the evening to buy. Or maybe they log in every month on a certain date to read your content. Whatever these patterns, there is a way to use this information to increase sales and target marketing techniques.
Geographic Location
There’s no point selling down jackets to Floridians in summer or bikinis to New York in winter. That aside, geographic location can also be used to let the marketing reflect regional events. Whether it’s a state holiday or regional news topic, businesses can use specific location-based information to inform, advertise, and connect.
Psychographics
This tactic allows you to take a deep-dive into your customers’ brains and understand their attitudes, beliefs, interests, and behaviors. Rather than segmenting purely by black and white demographics, this allows much more insight into people and provides much better targeting. For example, while someone’s income might be low, they may have significant savings and a love for designer clothes; marketing budget options would miss the mark.
This data can be gathered by questionnaires or surveys asking customers about their interests and hobbies. Using data, the business can create accurate personas and tailor marketing to suit exactly the right person. The ‘blast’ strategy of sending the same thing to everyone on a list is outdated, and simply doesn’t get the results an organization wants.
2. Intelligent Delivery
When do customers open their newsletters and on what device? Sending emails at the right time can increase open rates and click-through rates. It’s a combination of assessing past behaviors of customers and geographical knowledge.
The best software platforms can manage this in a variety of ways. This includes allowing the user to:
- Send immediately
- Optimize by user time zone
- Send at a particular time (such as a time-sensitive sale for Black Friday)
- Use AI to deliver to people based on their past behavior, optimizing the open rate
AI can collect data of individuals across various platforms and websites, assess engagement, and use this to inform and optimize the send time. It then tracks the open rates and can adjust as the campaign progresses.
3. Easily Create Automated Sequences and Journeys
Marketing isn’t about the size of a list, but it’s about the rate of actions taken from it. Creating highly tailored automated journeys is the best way to introduce, engage, and inspire customers and clients. In 2024, newsletter software should be smart, using AI to auto-send the perfect sequence at the perfect time.
What are Email Sequences?
These are series of automated emails that are designed to accomplish a certain goal. Examples of automated sequences include things like:
- Welcome or on-boarding sequences: An organization wants to welcome new sign-ups to the group, educate them on the mission, and help them realize the value of the product. It can be a series of emails unlocking more value, turning a free trial into a paid membership.
- Abandoned cart emails: Where a customer has placed items in their cart and then left the site. Timing is everything for this email: It should be automated to be sent out the following day, maybe with a carrot in the form of free shipping or a discount code.
- Birthday emails: Who doesn’t love being celebrated on their special day? If it comes with a discount code or freebie, even better.
- Special unlock access for specific customers: Maybe they’ve purchased a certain product or spent a certain amount.
- Nurture existing leads: This is about turning leads into customers. Hopefully, a potential customer that has viewed content or signed up for a webinar or eBook can be nurtured down the funnel.
- Re-engagement: Have an updated product or service? A friendly re-engagement email can reconnect with list members who have been inactive for a time.
- Conversion journeys : These upsell or cross-sell on items already purchased. This is a great opportunity to increase revenue.
- Event reminders: When someone has signed up to attend a physical or virtual event, there should be two sets of emails. One to remind them beforehand, to build excitement, and get them prepared. Another set to be sent after attending, getting feedback, selling products or subscriptions, and thanking them for attending.
- Subscription renewals: Remind people politely that their subscription is about to expire. There should be a campaign building up to auto-renewal and the emails should automatically stop once the customer has taken action.
It’s a lot of work to establish all these different scenarios, write a sequence of emails, and then track and adjust everything to improve outcomes. They’ve all got to be engineered perfectly to increase engagement and sales, but when done well, they can be an essential tool.
Unlike drip campaigns, which are static and don’t take the recipient’s preferences and behavior into consideration, these sequences are dynamic, highly segmented, and responsive. They track customer behavior to see:
- Cost benefit analysis: Is sending five emails worth it for a $10 purchase?
- Conversion rate: An email sequence should be seen as a sales funnel. Monitoring lead conversions and drop out rates (and where they drop out) help to improve results for the next time
- Time to customer conversion: How long did it take until the customer took action? How can that be improved or refined?
Great platforms should be incorporating AI so that the organization can see all this information at a glance. Using segmentation and intelligent delivery, customers can get the right emails at the right time.
4. Audience Growth Tools
A larger email list should theoretically mean more sales but that’s not always the case. New subscribers should be relevant to the business, increasing the likelihood that they engage with emails. How should an organization go about growing an audience in a natural and ethical way?
One way is to expand organization lists with high-quality, zero-party data. This uses a range of powerful audience development tools including email capture and browser push notifications. This also means moving away from legacy data collection methods using third party cookies or data partnerships and using more modern methods.
What is Zero-Party Data?
Data privacy is more important now than ever and organizations that use data inappropriately or without consent are punished in the courts of social media. The advent of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) means that misuse of data can result in financial penalties too.
Zero party data is the alternative to the previous ‘grey area’ methods of data collection. It’s an ethical form of data collection where a customer intentionally provides the organization with their details (in this case their email address). It’s sourced via a direct relationship with the customer, collected with full explicit consent, and highly accurate and reliable.
How is Zero-Party Data Collected?
There are a range of way that organizations can gather zero party data, including:
- Registration details provided when signing up with the organization
- Forms
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Funnels and interactive tools
- Social media
- Transactional data
- Ranking and rating buttons and sliders
- Browser push notifications
- Giveaways
- Gamification of offers
- Discount popups
- Free resources such as eBooks or guides
Essentially, an organization asks a person for their details, lets them know they will be contacted by the company, and they consent and provide the details willingly.
The best platforms do this in an intuitive and natural way, utilizing the following:
- Engaging experiences in a personal context
- Easy to use forms and methods that help improve data collection
- Clearly linking a benefit to the user
- High quality listening and feedback technology
- Natural language tools that use the customer’s own words
Once this data is collected, it should be stored in an intelligent database that collects all data types, both structured and unstructured. That means that the customer isn’t just an email address, but a complete person. This results in better segmentation and more personalization. The more tailoring and value the organization can add, the deeper and genuine the customer relationship becomes.
The harm of excess or unwanted emails maybe isn’t catastrophic at first glance. But if enough people report the emails as spam it could result in being blocked by the internet service provider, or the sender reputation with Google will be affected. This means that the organization’s emails are more likely to go straight to junk and spam inboxes. If a single email exceeds industry thresholds of ‘spam’ reports of 0.5%, email marketing providers may suspend the account.
A smart system should automatically add people who unsubscribe to a ‘suppression list’ which means they will not be contacted in the future. The focus should be on quality, not quantity. A large list doesn’t automatically mean massive revenue.
5. Reporting and Integrations
Collecting data, collating information, creating personas and segments, and beautifully tailored sequences are all great. But unless an organization has high quality reporting functions and the ability to easily allow data integration, it’s not very useful.
Integrations
There’s no single platform that does everything a business needs. Organizations grow organically, and software is typically added on an ad-hoc basis, filling needs as they arise. This means that for any new platforms added, they need to beautifully connect with legacy systems across the whole martech stack. From the content management system or sales platform and event management, there needs to be a seamless flow of information to create reliable data that informs decisions.
An example of this is when a customer clicks on a link in the newsletter and it goes to the organization’s website. Do they buy the item? Does the customer roam around the site, looking for more information? Or are they looking for a similar product? In order for this data to be available, the newsletter platform needs access to the website’s analytics.
Reporting
Modern newsletter platforms utilize reporting technology to drive improved results. This should be more than just telling the organization what happened to a particular email but encompass the larger customer journey. Reporting should monitor the success of the campaign or email and also evaluate options to improve. Things to look for include:
- A/B subject line testing: which subject line resulted in a higher open rate?
- The basics: bounce rates, click-through-rates, unsubscribes
- Analyze conversion rates resulting from an email or newsletter and customer behavior once they reach the site
- What devices and platforms are being used to view the emails?
- Social media and affiliate marketing monitoring
- Who opened emails when and where
- List growth over time
- Audience health (are subscribers active and engaged)?
- Journey and content performance
This information creates a holistic view of customers, their actions when they receive emails, and what they do afterwards. Emails shouldn’t be viewed in a silo or on a one-off basis, but as part of a larger journey. This can help inform strategies and allow you to create more effective campaigns in the future. Understanding the behavior of recipients can help to predict future actions and inform goals for future email campaigns.
Accurate measurement of success also allows marketing teams to see what is more effective; comparing newsletters to social media, for instance, can inform future choices about making the best choices for your specific audience.
Modern Newsletter Platforms Should be Intelligent
Contemporary marketing is no longer sending out emails, noting the open or unsubscribe rate, and then finishing the project. Organizations need to look beyond the traditional basic metrics and assess engagement trends that show the health of email lists, campaign performance, and segmentation effectiveness.
At the end of the day, modern newsletter software can make a huge difference for a marketing team that’s stretched thin. The top newsletter software programs allow organizations to focus their time and money on tactics and strategies that drive the best results.