Email newsletters often get a bad reputation. Some marketers are guilty of abusing email privileges and sending too many sales pitch emails. Such efforts soil relationships with contacts in your email list. A well crafted email newsletter provides readers with focused, valuable content. Things like white papers, best practice guides, educational content, or content exclusively offered to email subscribers. Here are a few tips to help your create email newsletters your subscribers actually want to read.
Focus on one theme
Email newsletters are typically a mix of content including educational material, news, recent blog posts and promotions. As a result, email newsletters often lack focus. When designing an email newsletter it is important to focus on one overarching theme. Instead of sending one general email with a smorgasbord of content about your company, industry, promotions and new marketing content, focus on one topic.
Provide Value
Let’s be realistic, even if your customers are head over heals for your product or service they likely didn’t sign up for your email newsletter to be bombarded with blatant promotional material. No flyers, please! The perceived value of your email content must outweigh the nuisance of being interrupted. Effective email newsletters provide value to the reader by including educational information, industry news, or email exclusive offers.
Respect Your Subscribers
I am sure your subscribers aren’t sitting at their desk on Monday morning with nothing to do but read your email newsletter. People are busy, so design your email newsletter with this in mind. Keep your copy and design elements simplistic so readers can quickly scan the email and digest the pieces of information that interest them.
Set Expectations
Set expectations right from the very beginning. Once you have figured out the newsletter focus and frequency, create a landing page that clearly sets expectations about what your newsletter will be like. Explaining the focus, frequency and content of your newsletter lets subscribers know exactly what they are signing up for.
Prioritize Calls to Actions
Given the nature of email newsletters there is bound to be more than one call to action within your newsletter. This is fine. Prioritize the content in a way that puts more emphasis on the most important call to action. This isn’t always the most profitable call to action. Remember that your subscribers didn’t sign up for a pushy sales pitch. If the goal of your email newsletter is to keep your brand top-of-mind then try calls to action that encourage subscribers to engage on other channels like Twitter or LinkedIn.
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