How to Build Community with Email Marketing

“Newsletters are making a comeback” is not a phrase we thought we’d be using thirty years after the channel’s popularization. As, social media has, at times, seemed to devolved from “a place to connect” with friends to an AI-generated political spamscape, however, some audiences are looking for less caustic ways to keep up to date with their favorite topics‌. Platforms like Sub-Stack, Ghost, and Beehiiv have acted as a catalyst in this revival by connecting the short- and long-form aspects of the blogging ecosystem. Each allows users to explore snackable content and microblogging as the first step in the journey to ‌longer-form written content. 

The newsletter format isn’t a perfect solution for all organizations. But, if ‌used correctly, it can be a powerful way to establish and grow a strong relationship with your audience. The key is thinking about newsletters to provide value, not earn customers.

Why Community?

“Building community” sounds trite – like a marketing conference workshop that espouses the power of storytelling in sweeping terms without telling you how to implement it. In reality, community is just the real-world application of branding. It offers a pragmatic approach to growth based on the fact that customers are more likely to buy based on a referral than a pitch. That means that in order to grow our bottom line, we don’t need to sell people on our products and services as much as we need to build trust and familiarity around our brand.

The fact that community isn’t discussed in more board rooms is the result of a KPI-driven digital marketing ecosystem in which leaders are forced to show the exact value of their strategy at every touchpoint.

“Making sure your content is actionable turns your email from an info dump to a valuable resource and gives your audience a reason to keep coming back.”

At the end of the day, the results speak for themselves, though. Buyers who feel like they’re part of a community are not only more likely to buy a product, they are more resilient in the face of a poor brand experience and more likely to advocate for your brand with likeminded buyers. That reduces your overall marketing investment.

Community isn’t a long con, though. It can’t be faked. It means working over the long haul to show buyers that you understand their challenges – that your values are aligned, and that you are not just doing it to sell something. And for all of its challenges, newsletters are remarkably good at doing this one particular thing.

Keep It F.A.V.F

In the early stages of building your community with newsletter marketing, you’ll want to keep it FAVF: Focused, actionable, value-forward, and frictionless. These are important because they show an inherent respect for the reader’s time – the first step in any meaningful relationship. Our focus has to be creating a relationship with the reader, the same that two people do. The rest will come in time, but the more you push a product, the less effective your content will be.

Focused

Newsletters come in many types. The most common offers a group of images, each containing a bit of preview text and an outlink to the sender’s website. While recap-style newsletters tend to make the C-suite feel like things are happening, they’re not great at driving meaningful engagement. In reality, your audience has limited time and newsletters with four or five pieces of long-form content behind them tend to pile up quickly and make readers feel overwhelmed. Enough of these in your inbox leads to brand fatigue and unsubscribes.

On it’s face, focus may seem like a simple matter of quality over quantity. It goes beyond that, though. It means single-subject emails that allow readers to deep dive into a topic in as few words as possible; tight, highly focused subject lines; a focus on one particular segment of your audience for whom the topic is highly relevant, et al. Not every recipient is going to be interested in every email you write, and that’s okay.  Any digital or communications marketer will tell you that a focused approach allows readers to make a better decision about whether it applies to them, which translates to stronger metrics.

Actionable

Thought leadership has its place, but it’s important to reward your readers by helping them take action. This may be in the form of a checklist, an invitation, a script, a piece of code, or any one of a hundred other tangible take-aways. Making sure your content is actionable turns your email from an info dump to a valuable resource and gives your audience a reason to keep coming back, open, and read all the way through your content.

The goal of your action item should be to help readers accomplish a specific objective – one that’s important to their desired outcomes. While that can be on any number of subjects, the S.M.A.R.T standard for goal setting can be a good guide here. That is: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Make sure that your action items follow these rules and you’ll give your audience a reason to come back.

Value-Forward

One of the most common mistakes marketers make is selling. That may sound counter-intuitive, but we’ve all been at the butt end of a hard sell and it tends to feel inauthentic and sort of gross. It also tends to have the backwards impact of turning people off your brand. Email marketing definitely isn’t immune to this trend, and many a marketer has spent the majority of the recipient’s attention trying to take something from them rather than deliver the value that is at the epicenter of community building.

Our job as marketers isn’t to sell. It’s to build trust and familiarity, so that when it comes time to make a purchase, our audience feels relaxed, confident, and excited. It’s important to thoroughly think through your objectives here because it’s easier to slip back into selling than you think. Even when attempting to get users back to your website, you’re asking for something from the user before providing it  – web traffic. Stay focused on providing value to the user without asking for anything in return.

Frictionless

For decades, the prevailing digital marketing strategy has emphasized “ownership” of your online audience. That is, the attempt to get audiences to consume content on your website vs a platform like Facebook or Gmail. Analytics folks like this approach because each additional click creates a measurable touchpoint. The idea that users would skip around to many sites to explore and consume content has always been a stretch, however. It only creates an additional level of friction that makes it less likely that your content is ever consumed.

Modern strategies emphasize consumption over measurability as vital to the process of community building. This idea is best expressed in ‘zero click marketing’ (ZCM). ZCM implies that content should be shared freely in whatever platform it’s distributed, without forcing users back to your website. When peeling the layers of this approach back, it reveals that there is often an unseen step between opening an email and clicking through. That step is building trust through high-quality content.

Newsletter Fit

Answers to other email marketing questions like “how often you should reach out to your audience”, “the best time to send an email”, and “what you should write about” are going to vary quite a bit depending on your industry. We don’t recommend sending any more than once a week, however. Deep list segmentation and email list hygiene is increasingly important, as well. Finally, subject matter should be based on industry trends that your audience has questions about, etc. This may take a bit of keyword research, but it’s time well spent.

Newsletter marketing may not be a perfect fit for every organization. For marketing leaders who understand the value of building a community around their brand, it can be a powerful weapon, though. Make time to deliver focused, value-forward, and actionable emails with as little friction as possible, and you’ll have taken the first steps toward growth.