By now, you probably know how important newsletters are in creating a strong connection between a client (existing or potential) and your company or product. Newsletters inform potential buyers about new products or developments within companies, provide the client with periodical (daily to monthly) company news, and they encourage client engagement, be it through a product purchase or a click to your website.
Inboxes are crammed with newsletters, and the competition over your client’s millisecond attention span is steep. In this article, I’ll give five critical do’s, which will all increase the odds of creating a superstar newsletter your client will happily engage with.
Create a Killer Email Subject
Think of newsletters as breadcrumbs for a bird – you throw one crumb after the other in the hopes of enticing the bird to come closer and closer to you. The first crumb people see in their inbox or their mobile push notification banner is the subject. I cannot stress this enough; you must create a subject that is bound to get their attention. Use personable language, questions, slang words, and keep the text short and sweet. You want the subject line to be short enough so it all fits in the visible subject line. Email subject lines are one of the most important ways of getting your little birdie to pick up that crumb and check out your content.
Take a Personal(ized) and Direct Tone
Today, it’s not only possible to customize emails with a personal greeting (“Hi David”, etc.), it’s essential. Moreover, researches show that an email that looks more like a personal email (rather than something that looks like an ad in a magazine) is bound to get your reader’s attention. However, readers do not like to be considered fools, so don’t take this too far and make it look “completely” like a personal email, otherwise you’ll be considered as spam. Stick to the genre.
Stick to One Target
You may have several targets in your email marketing strategy and that’s okay. Let’s say you’re working for a product company that wants to tell its clients about a new development in its product versions and invite them to download the latest version for a free 30-day trial. Before hitting that automated send button, make sure the entire email – from the subject and text to the engagement button, all correspond to a specific target goal. Resist the urge to share additional news with the client (however exciting it may be), or invite them to visit your recently revamped company website. Save those for another newsletter.
Be Persistent, But Not Overly So
It takes a user roughly 5 “views” of one call to action until they engage. Keep this in mind when scheduling your newsletter calendar. It is important to maintain regular contact with your client, but if you push it, they may remove themselves from your mailing list. Could you blame them? Nobody likes a nag. Even if the user agrees to receiving daily newsletters, if they don’t get a chance to actually read them, their frustration and guilt could lead right to the dreaded unsubscribe button. Not so ideal. There are two ways to work around this: If daily newsletters are important for your business, provide the client with a way to customize the frequency of receiving them (e.g. 2-3 times a week or even a weekly summary). The second strategy is to try and keep a bare minimum of 1 newsletter per week and not slide over into spam territory.
Be attractive, But Keep it Classy
Most newsletters that earn a gold star in conversions are the ones that do not look like a double-spread ad in a newspaper. Make sure your email has a nice and readable font, a pleasant layout, nice and soft colors (it’s not recommended to go completely B&W), and possible a photo or even two. If you can sign your name or even add your photo it would be great as well and will contribute to the personal allure of your newsletter. Try and skip elaborate layouts, many photos/sketches, rich media links and attached files, as these prove to work the reverse effect over your reader.
It’s important to remember the newsletter is a means to an end, not the end itself. Each newsletter must contain some call to action. Merely dropping it in people’s inboxes (even if they do read them) is making half the effort. In addition, without properly tracking a newsletter’s performance, you are literally throwing money down the drain, and what’s worse, potentially hurting your brand’s awareness. Before you start sending out emails, develop a reliable strategy for analyzing the open and click rates of your emails and developments in your subscriber list (new subscribers vs. unsubscribes). Go over every newsletter’s performance and evaluate what you can do better and what’s working.
Newsletters are still a super-effective means of marketing and client retention, but they become increasingly more difficult to pass through the user’s no b.s. filter. Analyze your current strategy, take note of which areas need a little sprucing, and get ready to revel in the success of your more precise and methodological marketing approach.