It’s not just you: more and more brands, from fashion to CPG, are starting up email newsletters.
Driven in part by the rise of platforms like Substack and in part by the collapse of search-engine discovery traffic, newsletters are having a moment.
Celebrities are starting them up, but so are major brands like Madewell, American Eagle, Rare Beauty, The RealReal, and countless more.
Challenger brands, like the non-alcoholic drink brand Ghia, have particularly set themselves apart with dynamic email newsletters that include recipes, founder updates, and musings on the state of the drinks business.
For leading brands, newsletters have become a profound way to engage a dedicated audience. If you can get a one-time shopper into your newsletter pipeline, you can gain their loyalty and upsell them on new products.
A good newsletter also puts a halo on your brand. Even if you can’t beat your competitors on price, readers who have regular touchpoints with your brand will understand why your products are worth the premium.
But how do you know if newsletters are actually worth your effort—and, more importantly, how do you attribute sales back to them?
The different types of brand newsletters
Newsletters are a pretty vast category. At the most sophisticated, brands use their newsletters to offer the origin stories of new products, or to dish out personal updates from their founder.
This more in-depth content approach works especially well if you’re a founder-led brand, where the personal touch of the CEO is part of your selling point.
If you don’t want to get so personal, you don’t have to, of course.
You can also devote your newsletter to highlighting use cases for your product. Say you’re a food or cookware brand—maybe you want to create a recipe guide for certain holidays or seasons.
What if you don’t want to devote as much time to written content? Even if you aren’t putting out full-blown essays in your newsletter, you should still have some kind of email offering.
Forget the detailed updates. Use your newsletter to highlight major sales events or discounts (such as on Prime Day) or new product launches from your brand.
Or, if you want, use email to push new upsells or cross-sells to your customer base.
How do I measure the value of an email newsletter?
Here’s where Intentwise comes in. We’ve talked before about how our Commerce Observability platform allows leading brands and agencies to see a full portrait of their marketplace performance across channels.
And yes, that even includes newsletters.
The thing is that customer emails are a valuable first-party data source in the world of marketplace commerce.
On your DTC site, you can easily map out the purchase behavior of your email subscribers. With an email address on file, you’ll be able to see who purchased from you, who added to cart, and who visited a product page.
Are your emails doing a good job of driving cross-sells? That data is right at your fingertips.
And it doesn’t end with your DTC site—you can also tie your email subscribers back to purchase behavior on Amazon.
Through Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can upload your first-party data, and match your customers to Amazon’s shoppers.
This matching process is incredibly useful for seeing how shoppers who buy from your DTC site or receive your physical mailers interact with your brand on Amazon. It is also useful for tracking the value of a newsletter.
Upload your email list to Amazon, and you’ll be able to see to what extent your newsletter subscribers are buying from you on Amazon—as well as what specifically they’re buying.
- Are you successfully driving your subscribers to purchase new products from your brand?
- Is your newsletter pushing enough upsells to be worth the investment?
- How does the LTV of your newsletter subscribers compare to non-subscribers?
AMC lets you map your newsletter subscribers across both Amazon and your DTC.
You can run certain ads targeted just to this audience, or you can exclude from your Amazon DSP campaigns—whatever you want.
You can also enrich that email data with other metadata.
Want to compare the LTV of email subscribers based on when they first got added to your email list? Or based on which product they first purchased?
As long as you include a column with the relevant metadata when you upload your email list to AMC, you’ll be able to make even these highly granular connections.
Admittedly, uploading 1P data to AMC can be a complex process—but Intentwise makes it easy.
Our Intentwise Intelligence software helps you hash your first-party data, enrich it with additional metadata, and run queries or audiences based on the shoppers matches you create.
Book a discovery call with us today, or sign up for our webinar tomorrow, where our CEO Sreenath Reddy will walk through the cutting-edge use cases of AMC first-party data uploads.
