Email Newsletter is one of the most common internet marketing tools, but one of the hardest to do effectively. If not designed correctly many times they are left unread in the inbox. But if you can nail this, newsletters can become a very powerful and highly-effective way to generate leads, increase customer loyalty, and drive organic traffic to your website. Below are some tips that can help you create an effective newsletter campaign:
1. Optimize for Mobile
As mentioned in an article by Momentology, “According to Unbounce, 75 percent of subscribers may delete a non-mobile optimized email”, it is of utmost importance to create a newsletter that is mobile friendly. No matter which device your audience uses to view your newsletter, it should look appealing in order to increase the open rate.
2. Keep it Short
As Colleen Corkery mentions in her post that according to statistics an average person spends around 51 seconds in reading a newsletter. Yes you read that correct, 51 seconds! So rather than creating long boring posts, keep your content scannable with content blocks, brief blurbs, snapshots, takeaways and/or bullet points and including call-to-action buttons will give your readers’ eyes a scanning sigh of relief. Provide just enough info to build the reader’s interest and then add call to action button and links to redirect them to your website/blog etc., for more info.
3. 90% Education and 10% Promotional
Readers don’t always want to hear about your product and you should keep that in mind while designing your newsletter. Ginny Soskey suggests that, “In your email newsletters, get rid of the self-promotion (most of the time) and focus on sending your subscribers educational, relevant, timely information. Unless you actually have an exciting, big piece of news about your product, service, or company”. The more you generate content that can be educational and entertaining for your reader the higher chances you have of your emails being actually opened and read.
4. Get Creative with Subject Lines
Subject lines are as important as the actual newsletter. You may have an amazing newsletter, but if you can’t get your customers to open it, then it’s of no use. So the first step is to intrigue your customer through your subject line to make them click on your email. Hostway suggests that “When creating your subject lines, think about the headlines that grab your attention in newspapers, magazines and emails you read and then model your subject lines after these headlines. Keep you subject lines short, simple and to-the-point with a twist of intrigue thrown in for good measure.”
5. Make it Easy to Unsubscribe
This may look like counter intuitive, but rather than having a long list of people who do not open your emails and bring your open rate down, you should have a short list of people who are actually interested in reading your newsletters. Make sure it is easy for the reader to find and use the unsubscribe option if they are no longer interested in hearing from you. This might shorten your list but will lead to have people who are genuinely interested in getting your emails.