Automated emails and flows are a cornerstone of modern email marketing. But regular newsletters play an equally important role.
29. april 2025
It is very common for 20% of the recipients on a mailing list to account for 80% of the actions (both purchases and interactions).
If you want to avoid the 80% who only account for 20% of the actions giving up on reading your mails, you need to make sure a large share of your ordinary newsletters includes content that is relevant to those who are not ready to buy anything.
There is no single right way of doing it. For some companies it makes sense to mix product content with inspiration, knowledge or stories. For others it is more effective to split content into different types: some mails focused on selling – and others that are more editorial or engaging.
The most important thing is that recipients want to click. Not necessarily to buy, but to read on, take part in something, or simply learn something. That kind of click matters – both because it keeps the recipient active, and because it signals to mail providers like Google, Microsoft and Apple that your mails are interesting.
Besides giving your recipients the good habit of responding to your mails, mails that make people want to click through also help you avoid the spam folder.
It is easy to create interaction with your recipients through games and competitions, especially if you already get many of your subscribers from that kind of activity.
If you put in a little extra, you can build competitions that at the same time increase recipients' familiarity with, and preference for, your products and services. Do that and you will certainly also increase the revenue from your mails over the long run.
Here are a few tips for using competitions the right way:
Use your own products or services as prizes, obviously. If that is too expensive, find prizes closely related to your products and services.
The quiz format can be very good for getting relevant messages across to participants.
Competitions people can take part in over several days, with both a main prize and daily prizes, can generate very high engagement (especially if you send reminder mails to participants).
In running competitions with a main prize, you can get many participants to answer questions about their concrete needs simply by giving them extra entries in the draw for the main prize. You can use the answers to follow up with targeted offers.
Remember that once participants have completed an action in your competition, you have an excellent chance of getting them to take other actions – with or without a reward. If you have a quiz question about a product or service, for example, you can say more about that product or service after they answer.
For companies already using competitions to attract new sign-ups, carrying that style into the newsletter is an obvious step. Here it is simply a matter of making sure the engagement continues after the competition ends.
The more relevant content you have – or can create – for potential customers in your audience, the easier it becomes to automate the ordinary newsletter.
If you reuse the content you already have in an intelligent way, it need be neither time-consuming nor technically heavy.