Some marketing specialists claim that newsletters are doomed. Do you agree? We don’t agree. For sure, bad emails annoy, but who can say he doesn't like short and interesting letters!
The majority of businesses – both big corporations and small-scale companies – continue to rely on this traditional marketing method. If you clicked on this article, then, most probably, you know that newsletters work and want to empower your email marketing. Here are 10 tips on how you can improve the quality of your newsletters.
If you want to attract readers’ attention to a certain subject, or promote a product or service place this piece of content first in the newsletter. As a rule, readers judge about the quality of the whole newsletter by the first impression. Thus, it’s better to invest sufficient time and human resources to ensure the high quality and readability of the first piece.
We all have different approaches to interaction with the content. Thus, when accompanying an article in the newsletter with an image, place a hyperlink both inside the text and image. For some readers, it’s easier to click on a big visual piece of content.
This advice is related both to the text and visual content. Images, the amount of text, fonts, logos, and additional links shouldn’t overshadow key messages of the newsletter. The smarter you will structure the content in the newsletter and the cleaner it will be, the higher are chances that the reader will find the relevant information.
Creation of newsletters is similar to playing dice – you never can be 100% sure which combination will win. Sometimes, readers will be attracted by emoji, while the other day they will fall for a detailed name of the article or an image. By doing A/B testing you can double the clickability of your newsletter. Send 25% of your subscribers one set of articles and provide another 25% with another batch. Then send to the rest 50% the newsletter which was better perceived by the readers.
Treat recipients of your newsletter as members of the community and not as a list of random emails. A newsletter is, first of all, a communication material, so when receiving it readers want to see that you are aware of their interests, content preferences, etc.
We are not sure why, but adding emoji to the subject of the newsletter increases its clickability. Probably, this weird trend will be replaced by something new in the nearest future, but judging from our own experience, it really works.
It’s very good to be creative, but creativity shouldn’t make the interaction with the content uncomfortable. When creating a newsletter, always search for a balance between creativity and practicality. It can be achieved by following simple advice. For example, the text should always have the header, body (consisting of brief paragraphs), and call-to-action in the end.
From the design point of view, colors and shapes used for the creation of something are very important for its perception by the final user. Newsletters aren’t an exception. Colors, fonts, images, and shapes applied in the newsletter should form a well-balanced, solid picture which transmits a particular message. You can find more information on how to apply colors and shapes here.
Content marketing is about helping consumers to adopt an informed decision. It means that you don’t have to propose any choice to your reader. Your main task is to persuade a reader to make a certain decision, and not two, three or five. A newsletter is a binary, yes/no game, that’s why it’s strongly advised to use only one call-to-action.
Newsletters are a perfect source of data about your consumers and their preferences. By analyzing the most popular subjects for them, as well as the type of content they like the most, you can easily improve not only your e-mail marketing but reshuffle the whole content-marketing strategy.
This brief overview of actionable marketing principles is intended to help you make your newsletters more appealing to your current and potential customers. We hope that they will serve you as a decent reference when you’ll work on the improvement of your email marketing.