If you publish an email newsletter you should strive to make each issue as relevant, targeted and timely as possible for all your subscribers. There should be content within the newsletter that will be of value for customers who are at different points in their business relationship cycle with your company. This content can help with retention and customer loyalty, or give them the ability to make the most of your products and services, up sell and/or cross sell to them - anything that will add value to their relationship with you. 

Most companies don’t have a sophisticated backend customer management system tied into their online marketing to create individualised dynamic content mailings, but this shouldn’t be a deterrent to striving for creating relevant content for each subscriber. There are ways to achieve simple personalisation (relevance) with email. For example, creating different subject lines - same newsletter - based on segmentation of your list.

Here are some tips. It's important to note to you that all of these strategies can be implemented in incremental steps as you go along. The key is to embark on your email marketing relationships with the plan to improve your communications each time you send.

Use the metrics from your mailings

One of the most valuable elements of email is its measurability. With analytics you can measure activities and behaviour of individual subscribers per mailing and also over a period of time. The metrics that can be measured include open rates, response rates, revenue, lifetime value, sales cost-per promotion, incremental lift and ROI. Tracking this information will allow you to learn about each of your customers and prospects.  This information will help you select content and articles that will be of interest.  The system you use should offer the ability to have back pages with your newsletter. This in effect gives you a microsite, which provides search engine visiblity along with increased metrics and allows you to measure a subscriber’s interest level in a particular event, service or product.

Aim for ongoing segmentation of your database

A recent MarketingSherpa study found that any segmentation increases clicks by up to 70%.  If you’re just getting started, review what data you do have within your company, such as sales history, geographical location - anything that gives you a jump-start on your profiling and segmentation. What can you segment? It can be as simple as separating customers from prospects, segmentation by geographic region, type of business, size of business, who it is from (e.g. Account Manager), or as sophisticated as dynamic content within a set newsletter template that reflects each reader’s interests, previous clicks and purchases.

Let the customer tell you what they want from you

To gain a real insight what your readers want - ask them! “Customer-controlled content” is a real buzzword in the industry at the moment. One way to provide this is to let the subscriber tell you how often and what they want to receive from you. Offer the flexibility to pick areas of interest, frequency, etc. This allows readers the ability to change their selections with each mailing. This will also allow you to segment in the back end based on their choices.

Appending customer and prospect information

If you have customers in your database without email addresses you may want to consider email appending. This is the process of adding a customer's email address to their record. The address is obtained by matching those records from your database against a third-party database to produce a corresponding email address. (More about appending)

Ask them for more information about themselves

Keep the sign up process for your newsletter simple, with a minimum of required fields. I suggest within the 5-6 fields region. (Here's an article on the topic.) Then look at ways to build on that information as your relationship develops. For example, offer a subscriber panel in each of your newsletters that will allow your readers to update their own profile.

Surveys, with incentives, can help you gain further information about subscribers. Ask for feedback from readers about future content for the newsletter. This feedback could include asking them to rate articles for usefulness.