E-newsletters for engineers: 3 key pointers to become more effective

E-newsletters are one of the most powerful weapons in the engineer’s armoury.

To your target market they act as reminders, informers, advertisements, engagement tools, educators, status and value enhancers. They’re a key tactic in almost every digital marketing strategy. Yet they are frequently misused and abused.

Recent research into over 1,000 respondents of engineering professionals (CFE Media 2015), demonstrated how to best reach this target by understanding the ways they find, use, and engage with content.

Most engineers understand that sending e-newsletters is a beneficial marketing tactic to share news with your audience. However, if you don’t know exactly how the recipients feel about this communication method, you could be wasting your marketing efforts and attaining no ROI.

To explore this topic, the survey asked respondents about the following:

1. The number of e-newsletters they subscribe to

On average, respondents subscribed to a total of 9 e-newsletters: 2 independent, 2 industry association, 3 magazine trade publication, and 2 supplier/vendor. That’s a lot of newsletters to read, so you need to work hard to ensure yours is really valuable to your target audience, and not just another ‘delete’ or ‘unsubscribe’. You’ll only get one chance to grab them!

2. Successful elements of an e-newsletter

When determining the successful elements and value of e-newsletters, the majority of respondents believed that valuable e-newsletters should contain one or more of the following five elements:

New technical content (89%)
Application stories (86%)
Quick facts (bulleted list format, 84%)
New products/services (82%)
Direct URLs to articles (81%)

3. How e-newsletters can be improved

The results also found that e-newsletters could be improved to be more valuable by:

1. Focus on one or two topics in depth (19%)
2. Less promotional and more objective (19%)
3. More relevant and new content (15%)

“Only write and send them when there is something that needs to be said. Having to invent content just because a publication is due is a waste of everyone’s time.”

Before sending out your next e-newsletter, spend some time thinking about these results to know how to best understand exactly what your audience wants to see and how you can improve your content. The more the newsletter is valued, the more effective it will be as a marketing tool.