When it comes to email, automation is the process of setting up the tedious, time-consuming tasks to run automatically. That way, you’re free to focus on the more important things, like content and analysis.
But just because automation handles the monotony of email doesn’t mean your automated newsletters have to be monotonous. In fact, you can automate your newsletters in a number of ways, creating an assortment of different newsletters. Here are 5 types of newsletters you can add to your email program with automation.
1) Daily newsletters.
The daily newsletter is the foundation of an email newsletter program. Not only does it present your audience with a convenient way to view your content, it gives you the opportunity to engage your audience on a daily basis. People might not visit your website directly each day, but with a daily newsletter, you have a strong chance of getting them to return.
As important as they are, curating a daily newsletter doesn’t have to eat up precious chunks of your time each day. With the use of RSS feeds (or choosing an ESP that integrates with your CMS), you can automatically populate your newsletters with content from your CMS.
When you automate your daily newsletter, you can reap the maximum benefits of audience engagement with the minimum manual labor. You also free up precious time to work on crafting newsletter-exclusive content, such as a personal introduction or even entire articles unique to your email.
2) Newsletters built around individual content verticals.
If you cover content in multiple verticals, you might have a different newsletter for each of those verticals. And if you don’t, you should probably get on that: each newsletter your audience signs up for is an additional chance for you to engage them in the inbox.
Once you have RSS automation or CMS integration in place, you can refine your automation process further with the use of categories or tags in your CMS. You can then create a newsletter for every content category or vertical on your site if needed. That way, you increase the likelihood that a newsletter is relevant to your site visitors, which can in turn increase the likelihood that they subscribe.
3) A weekly round-up newsletter.
While some people might have an appetite for daily doses of your content, some may prefer a weekly cadence. This makes your newsletters more palatable for parts of your audience, but with just one chance per week to engage your audience, you have to make it count.
For publishers who put out a lot of content each week, sending a weekly newsletter might mean leaving out some articles in favor of the content more likely to invite user engagement. You can use additional tagging in your CMS to prioritize content that belongs in the newsletter over articles that might not be as engaging for your newsletter audience.
With a weekly and daily newsletter in place, you can use newsletter cross-promotion to get your email subscribers into the one that fits their appetite for email. If a daily subscriber decides to unsubscribe from your newsletter, you can direct them towards the weekly newsletter, allowing them to opt down rather than opt out entirely.
4) A newsletter that shows off your top content.
In fact, you might even want to go one step further and create a newsletter explicitly designed to deliver your top content to your audience. By sending only your top content, you can deliver a newsletter product that maximizes opportunities for user engagement without overwhelming them with a long newsletter.
You can use tagging in your CMS to prioritize the articles you’ve found to be the most engaging, or you can use tools like Parse.ly or Chartbeat to identify and send your top content automatically. PostUp integrates with both of these tools, ensuring your newsletter content is always engaging, even if you don’t have time to manually curate content.
5) Personalized email newsletters.
Because email gets delivered directly to the individual, it’s a great channel for individual communication. Personalized email newsletters increase the likelihood of engaging your audience because their content is particularly relevant to the individual audience member.
Now, it’s extremely unlikely that you have the time or resources required to personalize every newsletter by hand—and if you do, please share your secret!—so personalization requires automation.
PostUp’s integration with Parse.ly allows publishers to achieve 1:1 personalization in their email newsletters by sending recipients content based on their reading history. With newsletter personalization, you can prioritize articles most likely to invite engagement while suppressing the articles they’ve already read, like Apartment Therapy does. After all, sending repeat content can be monotonous, and if there’s anything automation is good for, it’s getting rid of monotony.
To learn more about newsletter automation, check out PostUp’s brand-new Automation Solution Guide for Publishers. It takes just minutes to read, but can save you hours each week.