Work / Email newsletter
Relaunching an email newsletter
One catch-all newsletter split into two focused monthly sends. Click-through rose by half as volume doubled.
OutcomeTwo focused monthly sends in place of one catch-all newsletter, running since October 2021 and now covering four freight modes.
Context
In April 2021, I brought email marketing in-house, taking it over from a team that ran it across business units. The newsletter came with it: one monthly send covering whatever needed airtime that month. Every issue meant gathering input from several stakeholders and coordinating it into a single email, a great deal of time each month for very limited engagement.
The insight
Good news: the data showed exactly why people opened. They came for the air and ocean freight market updates, and kept coming for them even when they didn’t interact with the rest of the content, the same content that demanded the most work. The market updates had earned a send of their own. The other topics deserved one too: a webinar, a sustainability report or a product launch reaches more of the right people in an email built for it, sent to the contacts who have shown interest in that subject.
What I did
I retired the outdated templates first, then the format itself. In its place came two monthly emails, one for air freight and one for ocean, each built around its market update. Webinars, sustainability content and product updates each moved into a campaign of their own, triggered by what a contact had shown interest in.
I designed the email templates and the subscription landing page myself, first on Dotdigital. The landing page made subscribers a clearer promise: which markets they would hear about, and how often. It also became the place where contacts signed up themselves, with their consent on record. The first air and ocean sends went out in October 2021. When the team moved onto Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) in 2023, I rebuilt the same format there. It has since grown to cover four modes: air, ocean, rail and temperature-controlled ocean reefer.
The outcome
- ×2engagement
- +50%click-through
- 4freight modes covered
Engagement doubled, and click-through per email rose from under 10% to over 15%, while the number of emails sent at least doubled. The subscription page is still the main way new subscribers sign up.
Skills and tools
- Strategy
- Segmentation from engagement data
- Interest-triggered campaigns
- Consent-based subscriber growth (GDPR)
- Builds
- Email templates
- Subscription landing page
- Platform
- Dotdigital
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)
- Migration from Dotdigital to Pardot
