Originally posted on Marketing AI Institute
Nobody likes to realize they’re wasting their time.
But some interesting statistics show that marketers might be spending far too much time on emails. Get this:
According to the Email Marketing Industry Census, the most common time breakdown for a typical email campaign is as follows: Up to two hours for strategy and planning, up to eight hours for design and content, up to two hours for mobile optimization, and up to two hours each for transmission, reporting, and data.
That means most marketers spend up to 18 hours bringing every email campaign to life. That’s a crazy amount of time to spend on an email campaign unless you are directly generating sales revenue from the activity.
Now, newsletters are a fantastic way to drive audience engagement, but you might be sinking dozens of hours into them, with no clear ROI.
You can change that.
You could be spending much less time on the back-end work while achieving an improved result.
How? Here are four ways to get started.
1. Plan Ahead
Hopefully, your newsletter process is dictated by a strategic content calendar. Unfortunately, this isn’t the standard for many marketers, no matter how sophisticated. That’s because email newsletters are often an afterthought. Even newsletters launched with the best of intentions can fall by the wayside without some careful planning.
Start with a detailed content calendar where you plan everything from subject lines and preview text to the content inside the email. The more you can do ahead of time, the less daunting a send will feel.
2. Republish and Reuse
Your content strategy should contain a healthy mix of evergreen content to improve SEO and answer website visitors’ common questions. Have you considered reusing this content in your newsletter?
Perhaps you can put a fresh, timely spin on an evergreen blog post, and use it as an editorial feature in your newsletter.
You likely invest a great deal of time and energy in creating awesome content—so why not get as much mileage out of it as possible, while simplifying your newsletter process?
3. Dig Into the Data
Can you say offhand what type of subject lines perform the best for your audience? What send time is most likely to increase open rate? Which of your CTAs have the highest conversion rate?
Track this data, look for trends, make predictions, and adjust your newsletter accordingly after every send. Sure, it’s a bit of a commitment up front. But it’ll prevent hours of research into historical data down the road, when you need to determine why your metrics are plummeting.
Small, incremental time investments mean better performance and less questions down the road.
4. Automate as Much as Possible
Perhaps the best news you’ll hear about newsletters is they are largely automatable. Artificial intelligence tools use sophisticated algorithms to do things like:
- Write high-performing email subject lines.
- Pull data and make recommendations based on it.
- Automate send times based on when individual contacts are most likely to open emails.
- And even create hyper-personalized newsletters from scratch.
The best time-saving tip we can give you is to stop creating your newsletters manually and employ an AI-powered tool to eliminate the guesswork and repetitive tasks while improving performance metrics and reader engagement. It’s possible with AI.
Start Working Smarter, Not Harder, on Email Newsletters
rasa.io is a newsletter automation tool that not only simplifies the newsletter sending process, it creates hyper-personalized email newsletters for every single unique subscriber, based on their interests.
That means your subscribers benefit with extremely tailored, helpful content they actually want to receive in their inboxes.
And you benefit from time savings and improved performance.
Want to learn more? Sign up below.
