If your email inbox is anything like ours you’ll constantly get spam email that isn’t relevant or just doesn’t interest you. This might be from a company you’ve never heard of – or even worse – one that you have bought from. We regularly get newsletters from various companies but not many get the golden open they want, let alone the click through they desire.
Email is an important tool in marketing, but why are so many businesses getting it wrong? There’s nothing worse than getting an email from a company that you know, in the form of a newsletter – that doesn’t interest you.
We’ve put together our top 10 tips on writing email newsletters that people want to read.
1. Only Send When You Have Something To Say
One of the most annoying things for any consumer is simply getting too many emails. How many is too many? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month?
You can work out if you are sending too many emails by how many people unsubscribe to your email and by looking at insights of how many people open your emails. If you are seeing a high unsubscribe rate and low open rate – alarm bells should be ringing.
2. Keep Emails Simple
Opening an email and not knowing why you have received it can be confusing. Get straight to the point with the headline story and make sure it’s obvious as to why the newsletter has gone out. Going into too much detail is a cardinal sin and lots of words can bore the reader – you can and should always push people to your website to read more.
Are you sending out a newsletter about an upcoming conference or a new product? Think about what the main focus of the newsletter is, keep it simple and drive traffic to your website.
3. Write Great Content
Content is king. You’ll hear it time and time again but in newsletters, it’s never been more relevant. Newsletters are your chance to talk to your customers about great news, something that excites both you and them. But don’t go into great depth within the email.
It’s a chance to re-engage so make sure what you’re saying is a brilliant read. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes – what do you want to hear about?
4. Don’t Make It A Sales Email
While it is a great chance to talk to your customers, it is often abused by trying to sell new products or services that your business has introduced. While new things like this can go into the newsletter, don’t lead with an obvious sale – putting it below the fold will still get the message across without turning off the reader.
If you are constantly emailing ‘special offers’, just how ‘special’ are they? Customers can suffer from ‘offer fatigue’ where they turn off acknowledgement of specific companies special offers.
5. Allow A Choice Of Newsletters (if possible)
Are your newsletters going to be one for all and all for one or will you have separate newsletters for different customers? Will this be prospects or existing customers? If it’s customers are they going to be segmented into products bought or length of time they’ve been a customer.
If a customer has bought say, a television from your company – they won’t want to receive a newsletter selling them televisions. There are a lot of email CRM systems out there that allow customers to sign up to specific newsletters or to segregate subscribers depending on their past activity.
6. Measure
Measuring the success of your email campaigns can help you work out what content is working and engaging your audience and what simply does not interest them. If you’ve sent 100,000 emails and nobody has clicked the main story but 10,000 people have clicked on a story towards the end of your newsletter then you don’t know your audience.
Everything in your email should be linked to something back to your website so you can measure who is clicking what and make your newsletters get better over time with content that your customers want to read.
7. Design
Opening an email that is full of white space and text can make it look like spam. Having it branded up and colourful can attract the eye and gain attention.
Include your company name in the sender name to ensure your readers trust the email before they’ve even opened it.
8. Let Them Unsubscribe
This is a legal requirement. Including an ‘unsubscribe’ button that is easy to find and works is part of the law. It’s the law that you have to get them to allow you to contact them, it’s also the law that you make it relatively easy to stop these communications.
You can find out more about marketing and the law over here.
9. Give It A Great Title
The first thing people will see before they’ve even opened your email is the title and who sent it.
Putting the title ‘Company Name Newsletter’ can be bland and boring. Leading with your main article can intrigue readers to read more; just make sure you’ve adhered to point number 3!
10. Reply
No matter what happens, people will always try to reply to email newsletters. You can have big glaring buttons saying ‘contact us’ in the newsletter but it’s natural to hit that ‘reply’ button.
Continuously checking for replies in the software you use for your email marketing and getting back in touch with customers will add to the experience for the customers who want to talk.
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