You’ve passed the first hurdle: You have an email newsletter. You send regular, interesting content that is relevant to your readers. You’re doing everything right. But … your newsletter isn’t getting you the click-throughs you’d like. How can you boost your open and click-through rate?

Johannes Neuer, eCommunications manager for the New York Public Library (NYPL), suffered from a similar problem. In 2011, he noticed that open and click-through rates were down. “We want to keep subscribers connected with the library’s collections, programs and services,” says Neuer. “We can only do that if they actually open and click through.”

Neuer theorized that changing the way his team selected content for the newsletter could help correct the problem — and he was right. By integrating blog posts with newsletters and using multi-channel marketing strategies, the NYPL was able to tweak their content’s presentation to raise open and click-through rates substantially.

The key to multi-channel integration is using various platforms to promote the same content in different ways:

• Blogs — Highlighting blog posts in your eNewsletter directs traffic toward your best content. Existing blog analytics can help you identify which posts are popular, so you can be confident that your content will be well-received. Neuer found that even when blog posts were highlighted at the bottom of the newsletter, they were often “top performers” — by placing these highlights in prominent positions, NYPL increased newsletter traffic to its blogs by 135%!
• Twitter — NYPL used a social media monitoring tool to analyze the Twitter activity of their followers, and then used that information to choose relevant content to share. Even without such a tool, awareness of the conversation surrounding your business’s Twitter feed can guide your choices of what articles and subjects will be well-received.
• RSS feeds — To allow visitors to find the blog posts they want easily, NYPL has dozens of RSS feeds that can be focused by blog author, subject, blog channel, and more.

“Not only have we been able to maintain them, but we’ve actually increased these rates,” Neuer says of their newsletter’s increased open and click-through rates.

Your business can follow NYPL’s lead — and should. Why let valuable content go to waste, sitting in a blog archive where no one will see it? Integrating your blog with your newsletter will help you direct your viewers’ eyes exactly where you want them.

You may have a newsletter, but is it giving you the results you really need? Contact marc@provensystems.com for a no-cost evaluation of your current B2B marketing program. We know what it takes to boost open and click-through rates.