Guest Blogger Jeanne Jennings – Email Marketing Expert

McKinley would like to introduce a guest blogger, Jeanne Jennings.  Jeanne has more than 20 years of experience helping businesses develop an effective and profitable online presence. Her areas of expertise include developing email marketing strategies and email/online products for a wide variety of business and consumer companies, as well as associations, non-profits and government entities. Jeanne has worked with McKinley since 2004 and has completed multiple successful projects with our clients. We recently hired Jeanne to help us launch an email newsletter campaign and she has been kind enough to share her strategy for creating a successful e-newsletter with our readers.

You can also follow Jeanne on ClickZ – Marketing News and Expert Advice, where she is a regular writer sharing useful email marketing advice.

Case Study: Developing a Successful Email Newsletter for McKinley Marketing Partners
by Jeanne S. Jennings

Looking for ways to improve your marketing efforts?  So was McKinley when we worked together last spring to develop a successful monthly email newsletter for their business clients and prospects.

I know what you’re thinking: “Email? Isn’t email dead?” – far from it.  According to the Direct Marketing Association email returns the highest return-on-investment of all marketing channels. I would like to share with you an overview of the process I went through with McKinley so that readers can use our experience to help improve their own email marketing efforts.

McKinley’s target audience for this project was Senior Managers, Directors and Vice Presidents of marketing in medium-to-enterprise sized organizations. The business goals for this campaign were to:

• Drive professionals, currently looking for marketing consultants, to contact McKinley proactively
• Encourage referrals to other professionals looking for marketing consultants now, or in the future
• Position McKinley as the “go-to” source for high quality marketing consultants
• Keep the McKinley brand top of mind

When developing the newsletter strategy, I identified three keys to success:

• Taking a reader-driven approach
• Providing valuable, engaging content
• Showcasing McKinley’s unique value proposition which is the expertise of the marketers they can provide to business clients

Reader-driven Approach

There are a lot of email newsletters out there; some are great, but many aren’t very good at all. In order to be successful, a newsletter needs to be focused on the reader. Too many newsletters are “all about our organization” – the new VP we’re hired, the big client we just signed, why our product is better than the competitors. These aren’t reader-driven topics.

So how do you become reader-driven? I put myself in the shoes of the target audience. I thought about my own experience as a marketing professional, as well as that of colleagues. What challenges do marketers face today? What information would be helpful to them in overcoming those challenges? How can we make a few minutes spent with the McKinley newsletter something that readers will consider well worth the time?

I’m not saying that you totally disregard your own business goals; they have to be taken into consideration as well. The content of the newsletter needs to be driven by what the reader wants and needs, and then figure out how to work your business goals into that design.

Next time: How to Develop Valuable, Engaging Content