Source: saganmorrow.com
A newsletter is a form of email in which the goal is to regularly provide value to subscribers. The value can be from interesting content to promotional emails. The idea is to keep subscribers or customers engaged with your business or brand.
In this blog post, you will explore the key elements of writing high-quality newsletters that receivers would want to read.
Do Research on Newsletters that are Doing Well
To begin, it's worthwhile to examine popular newsletters and determine why readers are drawn to them. Even if they aren't related to your industry, it's important to review examples of successful newsletters. The objective is to compile a brief list of noteworthy newsletters and identify the factors that contribute to their success.
Should You Really Start a Newsletter?
You need to look deep into the reasons for starting a newsletter. Many times, businesses and individuals send out newsletters to their audience as part of their overall marketing plan.
The goal here is to weigh the ROIs of investing in newsletter emails. So, in case you find out that using a newsletter as part of your marketing strategy doesn’t seem to fit well – then it’s better to drop the idea.
Now that you’re ready for both a yes and no, the first thing is to do research in your specific industry.
If you look around successful newsletters in your industry, you will notice reasons why people like to subscribe to them.
Moreover, the other critical things to consider are:
- The time required and the time available to send out newsletters
- Financial costs to be incurred on newsletter emails and your marketing budget
The above two are the two main costs involved in the process. You need to forecast whether you can succeed with a newsletter or not.
Re-evaluate Business Aims
You need to keenly examine your business aims, such as:
- Is the goal behind sending out emails is getting newsletter leads?
- Are you looking to nurture and qualify leads so they make purchases down the road?
- Retain the existing base of customers?
Before taking any decision, weigh things well. See if customers in your industry are interested in emails.
So, for creating a better marketing strategy, it’s due diligence to gather enough data and reach a final decision.
And say that you’re ready to make email newsletters a part of your marketing – then here’s what to do next.
What Type of Newsletter are You Planning to Send Out
The main challenge with email newsletters is that there is no fixed boundary of what to send and what not to send. It’s because the newsletter is responsible for covering different aspects of your business from products to services.
Things can get confusing, inconsistent, and uninteresting for readers if you cover a lot of things in the same newsletter.
The best practice for nurturing lead conversion through email newsletters is by sticking to a specific topic about which you’ll send regular emails. This takes away any randomness, focuses the scope of email content, and makes your newsletter seem predictable to the audience.
The idea is to target potential customers who are interested in one type of product or service. And then create a dedicated newsletter around that product or service to keep the audience hooked.
Make the Content Much Less Promotional & More Educational
The sweet spot here is to go for up to ninety percent educational content and only ten percent of promotional content.
Even if you share super valuable content through newsletters, readers still get offended if you over-promote products or services. Doing more promotion and giving less value is one of the main reasons why hard-earned readers unsubscribe from your newsletter.
When you try to sell all the time, it’s clear to a person reading the newsletter that it’s about you, not them.
For example, pet lovers may subscribe to a pets blog because they want to enjoy informational posts on pet keeping. But, then if they start getting emails to buy this, buy that, every now and then – it’s obvious for subscribers to get offended and unsubscribe.
Your newsletter is there to give more value and do less promotion – otherwise, there is no point in waiting to hear from a business.
Tell the Audience What They Can Expect
As a trust factor, it’s important that you’re predictable. As you’re done with the selection of a topic to cover in an email newsletter, the next thing is to apprise readers about things they can expect. Doing so creates a sense of excitement in readers and makes you seem predictable.
Tell subscribers things like:
- How often are you going to send out emails?
- What topics should they expect to receive emails on?
The more you get specific, the better it’s for nurturing a highly-targeted base of potential customers.
Tweak & Spice Up Email Subject Lines
It’s super important that the subject lines of your emails are clicking. The subject line should be such that it should catch the attention of the reader in a way that they want to explore more out of curiosity.
Even though subscribers may be awaiting emails from you, that does not mean they will always open them. Customers do feel bored of receiving emails from marketers who keep repeating the same or predictable subject lines.
Although email newsletter senders want to keep that element of familiarity with customers. But, using the same old subject lines again and again makes the readers bored.
The best way to keep your readers excited about opening your emails is to keep the subject lines:
- Different
- Creative and curiosity arousing
- Engaging
These aspects should be considered in the whole automated marketing sequence of email newsletters.
Place a Clear Call-to-Action for Readers
Usually, we see that in newsletters done for inbound marketing, there are more than one CTAs or call-to-action. But, having to add more than a single CTA in no way means that the most important CTA cannot be given prominence.
The way to do this is by adding just one call to action in the whole email so readers are given just a single action to perform. Doing so leads your reader to not go astray and follow some other link that may not be your intended goal.
Source: mailerlite.com
Have clear CTAs so your readers know exactly what you want them to do. Be it clicking on a blog post, to go see a video, or clicking a link to go to a sales page – no matter what action, it should be singular and clear.
This way, you don’t leave any grey area where your audience begins to second guess or become confused about where they should click.
Follow a Strategy of Minimalism
Newsletters usually have images, graphics, and other written stuff that can easily overwhelm a reader. Your goal is to guide the reader step by step and not leave them confused about what to do.
To make sure the reader is engaged with all the content in the newsletter – keep the design and copy minimal. The whole written copy should be to the point, and well-connected. Whereas, the design should not be overly exaggerated.
Readers do not have time to read your email all day long. What they appreciate is bite-sized information that they can quickly digest and get to the next step.
Give Readers the Ease of Unsubscribing Anytime
An engaged subscribers list for an email newsletter is the one that’s not bound to stay with you and actually loves your content.
It may sound scary, but one of the ways you maintain a healthy relationship with newsletter subscribers is to keep the exit door open. This way, your high-quality content gives them a reason to voluntarily stick around.
Also, having a clear unsubscribe button also gets the email bots to not mark your emails as SPAM and move them to that backyard folder.
Do A/B Testing on What Works
If you think that only planning, making an action plan for emails, and sending them out regularly will do – then you’re probably not right.
It’s important that you try and test different content techniques and design layouts for sending emails.
Sending out newsletters and successfully nurturing leads is a matter of focusing on what works and what doesn’t. And then do more of what you think is working out well in your industry.
Different groups of newsletter subscribers obviously have different interests and the type of content they want to consume.
You need to find what content your audience likes the most by simply testing different types of content and seeing what rhymes well.
Wrapping Up the Discussion
If you think your business will benefit from newsletters, then keeping the above points in mind will help make audience-focused email content. And if you think you don’t have the time to do the research, make a plan and execute it – then visit here to get full-fledged newsletter writing services.
You can book time with us to discuss your Newsletter needs and how we can help you achieve your Newsletter goals. Just click the image below.
