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How Newsletters as Multichannel Marketing Strategy Boost Your ROI
How To Overcome Email Newsletter Multichannel Marketing Challenges
Linda Hwang
November 1st, 2024
Sticking to one channel for your marketing strategy will inevitably sink your business.
That’s why many companies have started including a multichannel marketing strategy in their toolbox.
Take it from Adam Singer, head of Marketing at AdQuick, a prominent MarTech platform, “We market in a mix of online and offline channels, covering the full funnel of where advertisers and marketing professionals spend time.”
He added, “This includes search, Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising, and of course, email marketing through beehiiv, our largest email channel.”
Adding email marketing to a multichannel marketing channel strategy not only improves your outreach but can be a cost-saving addition to your budget.
We will focus on ways to help you master a multichannel marketing plan by using email, which will not only garner you success but also help you improve engagement and return on investment (ROI).
Table of Contents
TL;DR
Sticking to one marketing channel can harm business growth; multichannel strategies are vital.
Email marketing offers a high ROI, with an average of 3600%.
Challenges of multichannel marketing include maintaining brand consistency and managing channel fatigue.
Automation and data-driven personalization enhance multichannel marketing effectiveness.
Continuous optimization and integration with other channels are key to success.
Understanding Multichannel Marketing: The Big Picture
Have you ever wondered how companies expand their reach and skyrocket their sales without breaking the bank?
Their secret is multichannel marketing.
The object of multichannel marketing is to communicate with and market to your audience on various platforms. These can include physical as well as digital touchpoints.
When you reach customers through different avenues, businesses can meet them where they are, allowing customers to choose the most convenient way to receive information.
Mind-blowing 🤯, right?
Just think, if you invested in both channels, how far would your reach go?
Why Multichannel Marketing Matters
Google found that 95% of customers will use more than one channel when making a purchasing decision.A Salesforce survey revealed that 72% of consumers and 89% of business buyers think brands should understand their unique needs and expectations across multiple channels.
These stats reveal just how important creating a sound multichannel marketing strategy is if you want your brand to relate and resonate with customers and ultimately drive conversions and sales.
Boosting Engagement and ROI
Studies show that multichannel campaigns can increase engagement up to 300% compared to single-channel efforts.
Insane, right? What a win for your ROI.
According to the Harvard Business Review:
About 73% of consumers prefer shopping through more than one channel.
Omnichannel customers spend more in their transactions, on average 10% more online and 4% in-store.
Overcoming Multichannel Challenges
Of course, with the great power of multichannel marketing comes great responsibility (and a few headaches).
Let’s discuss some common challenges.
It isn’t easy to perfect your brand voice and style on one platform. Think about how challenging it can be to remain consistent through multiple platforms.
Not all platforms use the same image sizes and character count—forcing companies to create multiple images, post captions, and hashtags.
Channel fatigue is another growing concern for businesses and consumers. Also called “channel fog,” this concept refers to the growing overabundance of communication and data options available that flood the channels and dampen the efficacy and output.
Channel fog is an issue with marketing operations.
It can lead to a complicated number of notifications that employees and customers have to go through as they attempt to interact with a brand.
The struggle of choosing what channels to use – as well as how and when to use them – is a critical decision for any business. They must find a way to isolate and optimize the right channels if they’re going to succeed.
Thankfully, beehiiv is here to help cut through the clutter.
With the right strategy, these challenges become opportunities for innovation for companies.
Email: The Cornerstone of Your Multichannel Strategy
Every day, over 4 billion human beings open up their email inboxes to hear from their friends, brands, and creators they love the most.
Sure, social media receives all the praise for being the “number one medium” to reach people, but when you look at the statistics, email continues to dominate.
Readers opt-in to hear specific topics, ensuring their preferences are met. The moment the content doesn’t meet their needs, they can unsubscribe.
Newsletters give readers complete control.
For brands, it’s an opportunity to double down on growth and diversify their revenue stream.
Brad Kellard, the founder of The Money Buzz, shared, “Since launching The Money Buzz, beehiiv’s Ad Network has made monetizing our newsletter effortless from day one.”
He explained that if he were to go the traditional route and manually hunt down different brands to sponsor his newsletter, it would have taken him a lot of time he doesn’t have.
Kellard continued, “[The Ad Network] connects us with quality sponsors that would’ve taken significant in-house resources to organize. We can choose sponsorship opportunities that fit our schedule and criteria, ensuring the ads resonate with our audience.”
Why Email Still Reigns Supreme
5 to 10 years ago, marketers and companies alike were throwing money into Facebook ads, and it would turn into a money tree.
Fast forward to the pandemic, Facebook made a few changes to its algorithm that put online advertisers into fear and panic. In an instant, it was harder to reach audiences, more expensive to generate revenue, and profit margins started to shrink.
Do you know who didn’t get phased by these changes?
The creators and companies who already diversified their marketing efforts with a newsletter.
We mentioned this earlier—email marketing delivers an average ROI of $40 for every $1 spent.
😲 I’m still in shock by the numbers.
4000% return on your investment.
So, why do email newsletters have that much pull with readers?
It’s highly personal, relevant, and customizable.
Integrating Email with Other Channels
If you’re launching an email newsletter and you want to promote it, paid engagement on social media is a great bet, especially for finding people interested in becoming paying subscribers.
Geoff Sharpe, co-founder of Lookout Media and writer of Ottawa Lookout, credits paid engagement and ad spend as the reason he was able to grow to 32,000 subscribers.
Or, if you already have a large following on another platform, having a newsletter can enhance your relationship with your audience.
Robin Arzón, 27x marathon runner, New York Times bestselling author, and one of beehiiv’s extremely successful newsletter creators, commented, “Social media casts a wide net, but newsletters go deeper in the conversation.”
“The newsletter is where my followers, future followers, and beyond can meet in one place and have that conversation about movement, fashion, growth, mindset, and those thousands of inflection points,” ended Robin about her newsletter, The Pivot.
Building Your Multichannel Marketing Powerhouse
Ready to construct your marketing fortress?
Let's lay the foundation brick by brick.
Know Your Audience Inside Out
For any successful newsletter, you’ll need a clear strategy that aligns with your goals and target audience. Develop a content strategy, establish your tone and voice, and plan your distribution schedule to ensure consistency.
Here are the first questions you should be asking:
Who is my target audience?
What do they read, and what other sites do they spend time on?
What actions do I want my readers to take?
What key metrics are important to my success?
What is my brand’s voice and visual identity?
Answer these questions, and you’ll be well on your way to having a strong newsletter marketing strategy.
Data-Driven Segmentation
What are the odds of you opening an email that addresses you directly versus one that seems mass-sent?
You want your audience not just to open your email but to engage with it.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make sure your audience finds the perfect fit with your content- segmentation.
Data-driven segmentation helps customize campaigns like tailoring a suit.
Just as a well-tailored suit accentuates your style, with segmentation, you can customize your emails to perfectly fit your audience's preferences.
By delivering data-driven, personalized, and relevant content, you can create a powerful and impactful message that resonates with each subscriber.
And the benefits are as satisfying as hitting "send" on a perfectly crafted email:
More relevant content.
Higher engagement rates.
Increased conversions.
A more effective and successful email marketing strategy.
Behavioral Targeting
You can segment your audience by user behavior to improve KPIs such as conversion rate.
It’s like predicting your audience’s future interaction.
If a subscriber displays favorable behavior when using your website or reading your emails, this would make them a good candidate for a segmented list, as you know that you’re likely to receive good engagement from them again.
User behavior, such as click-through rate (CTR) or time spent on your website, could be used as segments or even as good open rates on previous emails.
Segmenting audiences by demographic is another popular way of using segmentation. This enables you to segment subscribers by their individual attributes and provide emails that are tailored to specific audiences.
This could include segmenting your audience by:
Age
Sex
Nationality
Occupation
Demographic targeting is perfect if you want to target subscribers in a specific city, for example, or perhaps people over the age of 25.
Choosing Your Channel Mix
Not all channels are created equal.
I’m sorry if that pains you to hear.
The perfect channel is not the same for every single industry, niche, or company.
What are the different channels to connect with your audience?
Since we love statistics here:
83% of marketers use social media.
67% use search marketing.
66% use videos or live-streaming.
40% of marketers identify their greatest multi-marketing challenge as getting the right message to the customer at the right time.
So, what do you do?
Start strategically picking favorites.
Channel Prioritization
Through metrics and engagement, identify which channels resonate most with your audience and allocate resources and budgets accordingly.
The key is: don't spread yourself too thin, trying to be everywhere at once.
If you lack engagement on Facebook, that’s not your channel—on to the next channel.
Here, I’ll say it: you don’t need to be on every single platform to succeed.
Maintaining Brand Consistency
You’ve heard it before: consistency is key.
The same applies to email marketing as a multichannel strategy.
Consistency helps build a strong recognition of your brand identity, allowing customers to recognize your content no matter where they are.
To maintain consistency in your brand voice:
Develop brand guidelines that detail your brand's voice and tone.
Regularly review your content to ensure it aligns.
Some people have a strong voice but struggle to articulate it. If you have representative content and want help, try using artificial intelligence (AI) to create a style guide.
With your brand look, customize your email service provider (ESP) templates to maintain consistency in your email design, tone of voice, and messaging.
Also, make sure to:
Use your brand’s colors, fonts, and logos.
Add your other marketing channels (that have the most engagement) to your templates.
Measuring Success: Analytics and Optimization
The question is how to leverage email marketing to grow your audience, sell more, monetize your content, and see a better return on investment (ROI).
Success leaves clues in different forms.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
One form is through key performance indicators (KPIs).
When you set clear and measurable goals for each channel, you’ll be better prepared to discover how well your channels are performing.
You will only create real success once you understand the KPIs that bring the right results.
Understanding the intricacies of these metrics is pivotal for marketers striving to navigate the complex terrain of audience interactions effectively.
There are many KPIs that you could use in your marketing strategy, but they’re not all equally important.
Once you have a multichannel marketing channel strategy in place, you can drill down to which KPIs are deemed important to measure the success of your business.
Channel-Specific Metrics
Each channel has its own set of metrics.
For this article, we will primarily focus on email marketing KPI metrics.
Here are three essential KPIs that can help you understand and improve your email marketing strategies:
Open Rate
Open rate is the proportion of email recipients who opened your message. Here is an example:
Open rate = (Total opens / Total delivered) x 100
If you send 1,000 emails and 200 of them are opened, your open rate is 20% ((200/1000) x 100).
A high open rate indicates that the subject line and preheader text enticed recipients to open the email and interact with the content.
A low open rate, on the other hand, may indicate that the subject line was not compelling or that the email was not delivered to the inbox of the intended audience.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate emerges as a paramount KPI that directly reflects the success of campaigns in turning leads into valuable customers.
This is where the actual money comes to your account.
Understanding the significance of conversion rates and employing strategies to enhance and measure them is essential for marketers and companies striving to maximize the impact of their email initiatives.
You can calculate your conversion rates by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total website visits.
For example, if you had 70 conversions from 1,000 interactions, your conversion rate would be 7% since 70 ÷ 1,000 = 7%.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate (CTR) measures the number of unique clicks from readers divided by the number of emails opened.
For example, let's say you sent your newsletter to 100 people, and 50 of them opened it.
If you achieved a CTR of 4%, it means that you had two unique clicks (4% of 50) from your readers.
The click-through rate provides valuable insights into the engagement of your audience.
Cross-Channel Attribution
If your business has a website or Instagram (IG) page, it’s important to get a sense of how people are coming across your content.
One way is through UTM parameters.
Attribution framework touches on a few points:
Channel: The method by which a subscriber is added to a publication.
Source: Where a subscriber came from before subscribing.
Medium: How a subscriber came to a publication.
How does it work?
Think of page tags that you can add to the end of your URLs.
These “tags” allow analytic software to track specific information, such as how visitors are being driven to your site and how they’re interacting with any content associated with a campaign.
These “tags” are created by taking a URL, say beehiiv.com, and adding a “?” to the end, followed by up to five standard UTM Parameters, each separated by a “&”:
utm_source
utm_medium
utm_campaign
utm_content
utm_term
Continuous Optimization
If you were to ask any experienced marketer for advice, most of them would say, “The only constant in marketing is change.”
Embrace this.
Continuous optimization is an ongoing process that takes reader feedback and regular testing to increase user experience, engagement, and conversions over time.
A/B Testing
Pick your favorite in the following:
Which of the following titles grabs your attention and makes you want to read the rest of the article?
Subject Lines: The Unsung Heroes of Your Inbox!
Open Me for a Subject Line Reveal!
Click Here for Subject Line Shenanigans!
The great thing for you is that you get to test each of these subject lines against your subscribers before you publish.
As we listed above, open rates are one of the most important metrics for publishers and content creators.
Testing your subject line is a great way to ensure that the best subject line is sent to your subscribers.
Customer Feedback Integration
If you’re invested in growing your audience and building your brand, collecting audience feedback is the best way to tell your subscribers that you value their opinions and want to build a strong relationship.
But what is the best way to get your audience’s opinion?
Just incorporate feedback surveys in your email newsletters.
That way, you can develop the content your audience wants to read and take action on things that aren’t working.
Getting reader feedback is more than a “Yes, I like your content” or “No, I don’t like it.”
You want some specifics about your readers that you can craft into your content.
So, when you’re crafting feedback questions, think:
Clear and concise email: Ensure that your copy is easy to understand and keep it short and sweet.
Keep questions specific: Craft your questions to align with your content and make sure that they aren’t too open to interpretation so that you receive responses that you can take action with.
Be transparent: Tell readers what you’ll do with their feedback, and if you take action based on their feedback, let them know what worked and what didn’t.
Remind readers that all responses are anonymous: Assure them that they are able to say exactly what they think because their names are not attached.
beehiiv makes it easy to survey and poll your readers.
On your beehiiv dashboard, under Audience, scroll to Polls or Surveys.
Click the New Poll button on the right side of the Date Published.
Name your poll and add a description.
Select Poll type.
Fill out Poll Options.
Click the Save button.
Done!
Personalization: The Secret Weapon of Multichannel Marketing
Did you know that nearly 60% of businesses admit email marketing is their biggest source of ROI?
The reason it outperforms social media, paid ads, and even SEO is that it’s highly targeted.
This is made possible because email marketing stands on the firm foundation of an opt-in.
People have taken a specific action to consent to receive marketing messages. In other words, they’ve told someone they want to be sold to.
Even more importantly, you can split up your audience into segments based on different sub-categories. This means you can send even more specific and relevant messages to your audience that will outperform more generic ads.
Why Trust Me
Linda Hwang has extensive experience in B2B marketing and previously worked at a renowned international facilities management company. There, she played a crucial role in creating effective content and social media marketing plans. Now, Linda is a marketing consultant who helps small businesses create compelling brand stories.
Data-Driven Personalization
Personalization can be as simple as addressing your readers by name or as complex as dynamically inserting content like products they’ve viewed.
One of the most powerful personalization tools is a segmented email list. For example, an investment newsletter might send a very different version of its newsletter to new investors, retirees, and high-net-worth individuals.
Tracking your readers’ behavior can also help you send personalized messages.
For example:
Following up with people who clicked a link in your last email
Asking people who haven’t opened your previous five messages whether they want to stay on your list
Testing new ideas with your most responsive readers
Sending a message to someone who abandoned items in their shopping cart
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
In the marketing world, customer data platforms (CDPs) are the brains of your personalization efforts, centralizing customer data from all touchpoints for a 360-degree view.
This incredible technology allows businesses and marketers to pull in customer data from any channel (social media, email, etc.), system, or data stream to build a customer profile.
This sounds like sci-fi fantasy, doesn’t it?
Don’t worry; it’s not cloning you.
Here’s how CDP works:
Collects Your Data: CDPs are the central hub of your customer data. Anyone from your company who has access to the CDP can collect information about your customer.
Creates Customer Identities: CDPs take all the data points and create identities for your customers. It takes known information like email addresses and phone numbers and anonymous data like cookies and mobile device IDs and spits out a whole picture of your customer’s buyer journey.
Pulls Insights: Once your CDPs create unified customer profiles, it’s easy to see your customers as a whole picture. You can create segments or personas to help target new audiences.
Here are two CDPs that are exceptional:
Salesforce Data Cloud
With a 4.4 out of 5 stars, Salesforce Data Cloud leads the pack on the Gartner Peer Insights site. As a product, users ranked it 4.5 out of 5 stars, saying integration features with other applications and data collection are stellar compared to other products.
Some users have stated the product wasn’t the best fit for their industry yet, especially life sciences and healthcare.
Price: Free trial and starts at $25 per month/user/ billed annually.
Treasure Data CDP
With 4.3 stars out of 5 stars, Treasure Data CDP comes in second place on the Gartner Peer Insights site. 83% of current users would recommend the platform to others, and the product’s ability to scale and integrate is a positive feature that users boast about.
A few users have critiqued the need to pay extra for a lot of add-ons that should be included in the product.
Price: To be determined by talking to a representative.
Personalization Techniques
Since personalization is key to an effective newsletter, let’s look at different techniques that can help take your newsletter from “Mmm, good” to “Wow! This is amazing!”
Dynamic Content
We all want to stay ahead of the curve.
How do we do that with email marketing?
By personalizing your email content.
That’s where dynamic content reigns supreme.
Dynamic email content changes based on various factors, like recipient behavior, location, and preferences.
Swap out content blocks in your emails and web pages based on user data. It's like having a shape-shifting website.
By making sure your content is matched with your individual readers, you can increase open rates, engagement rates, referrals, and other metrics that ultimately drive conversions.
Great ways to add dynamic email content are:
Personalized Subject Lines: Use the recipient's name or include details about their recent activities to create customized subject lines.
Segmented Content: Use segmentation to tailor the content of your email to different groups of subscribers based on their interests or behavior.
Abandoned Cart Notifications: If a subscriber abandons their cart on your website, send them an email reminder with dynamic content that shows the items left in their cart and encourages them to complete the purchase.
Predictive Personalization
As we round out 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) has been enabling mass personalization.
As marketers, we now have access to unimaginable amounts of customer data.
With AI and machine learning, predictive marketing and predictive personalization are at the forefront of digital marketing.
Predictive analytics are being used to predict a customer’s buying behavior.
The predictive analytics market is projected to be worth 35.45 billion dollars by 2027.
Simply adding [First Name] to your subject line isn’t going to cut it anymore.
It’s now possible to:
Avoid spam blockers by finding out which ISPs are most likely to block emails.
A/B test the same email to send to customers at different stages of the buying cycle depending on whether or not they’ve opened it, then use the open rate and engagement data to segment our audiences.
Personalize email at scale with individual information from prospects’ LinkedIn and social media presences.
Automation: Streamlining Your Multichannel Efforts
Email marketing remains a crucial component of any successful digital marketing strategy.
However, managing email campaigns and maintaining personalized interactions can become overwhelming as businesses grow and customer bases expand.
That is why you need automation.
This is where workflow and campaign automation, lead scoring and nurturing, segmentation and personalization, and integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems come into play, transforming email marketing from a labor-intensive task to a streamlined and efficient process.
Take it from Dakota Robertson, founder of the Wrongs to Write newsletter. He said, “I’m trying to get people onto my newsletter because once I get somebody onto my newsletter — like with beehiiv Automation — I can send the welcome sequence.”
“This gives my subscribers a bit more information on my personal story, my journey, my values, results I've gotten for people, and basically warms them up to who I am and what I do,” he concluded.
Automation Platforms
Used properly, the ideal email tool should create the illusion of a dedicated workforce committed to your brand.
Email automation platforms offer a wide range of features.
Make sure to consider:
Type of workflows available
List management and segmentation options
Reporting and analytics
Integration with other tools
Not all features will be equally important to your brand.
beehiiv
beehiiv is a powerful and versatile solution among the many marketing automation platforms available.
Factors to Consider:
With few clicks and non-code, you can automate your workflows.
Integration Capabilities: Consider how well beehiiv integrates with your existing systems.
Seamless integration with CRM, e-commerce platforms, and other tools ensures a cohesive and efficient marketing workflow.
You can integrate beehiiv with almost every relevant platform in the email marketing industry.
Automation Features: The heart of any marketing automation platform lies in its automation capabilities.
Pricing: beehiiv offers a free plan called Launch, then $39 for the Scale plan.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a popular all-in-one marketing automation platform encompassing CRM, email marketing, social media, blogging, and SEO tools.
It is renowned for its user-friendly interface and ease of use, making it a favorite among small to medium-sized businesses.
Factors to Consider:
Integration and Customization: Consider how well HubSpot integrates with your existing tools and if it allows customization to suit your specific marketing needs.
Pricing: While HubSpot offers free options, evaluate the pricing tiers and features to ensure they align with your budget and requirements. HubSpot's engagement cons include its relatively higher pricing.
Integration Capabilities
Sometimes, we want things to be done quickly and correctly.
Is that so wrong to ask for?
The more connections you can make in your marketing toolkit, the better overall picture you can access of your business.
beehiiv offers integrations even with their free plan.
That’s almost unseen in the marketing world.
Here are some integrations beehiiv offers:
Migrate content
Add subscribers
Update your audience
Workflow Automation
Eliot Crist, CEO of Fantasy Life, said, “New product features are coming out at a fantastic rate. It’s beehiiv’s quick response time to everything that has exceeded my expectations.”
Like beehiiv’s Automation 2.0.
Automated email workflows are pre-determined sequences of actions. They often include contact management or communication.
This action triggers a second action, often an email or an email sequence designed to guide the user towards your desired outcome.
Then, it's time to receive your report card. Most email automation tools provide analytics features that allow you to monitor key email marketing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
By tracking these metrics, you can identify what's working and what's not, and tweak your emails accordingly. For example, if an email has a low open rate, you might try changing the subject line to make it more enticing.
Final Thoughts
Mastering multichannel marketing with email at its core is no longer optional—it’s essential for business success in 2024.
Don’t let your email marketing efforts fall behind—join the ranks of successful businesses and creators who trust beehiiv to elevate their multichannel strategies.
Sign up today and unlock the full potential of your email marketing newsletter!
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