Newsletters are an incredibly useful asset. Arriving in people’s inboxes is a great way to get impressions and business. But, there are stipulations to this rule: the main one being that it has to be done right. Email marketing has evolved over the last few years, and best practices are different than they once were. Here are 6 ways to improve your newsletter game.
Education, not Promotion
One of the biggest elements of content marketing is educating your viewers and potential leads. You don’t really want to try and preach your product to them, that turns people away these days. Rather, you want to draw them in by providing value outside of what is paid for—the same works for email marketing. Link to blogs you’ve written and include facts about your industry. If you’re a local business, write about the goings-ons in your community. Giving people relevant and valuable content is going to result in more opens and better reception.
Personalization
In a lot of newsletters, especially promotional ones, it can be frustrating for customers when they receive an offer that has nothing to do with their activity on your website or around your business. The simple way to make personalization accessible is through segmenting. You can learn more about segmenting here. Making sure that people get content and offers are customized to the specific segment is a great way to ensure that people enjoy the newsletters that you’re sending them.
Accessible Cross-Platforms
People check their emails on virtually every device possible: their laptop, phone, tablet-even their watch! People can get irritated when they can’t access their platforms on all of their devices. This is applicable to websites, and it’s applicable to newsletters too. You need to make sure that your newsletter can be accessed well on all devices. For watches, this can mean including HTML text to ensure that even if the image can’t show up, the text will. If your newsletter looks nice no matter what device opens it, the likelihood of success increases.
Get (and listen to) Feedback
Nobody knows your audience better than themselves. If you include a feedback form on your next newsletter, or send out an additional one requesting feedback, you’ll get extremely valuable insight into what your audience wants to see from you. From there, be sure to actually read the answers and, with enough popular demand, implement some of the changes that were suggested.
Use a Concise Headline
People don’t want to read a super long subject in their emails, especially if it isn’t work related or family related. Keeping your headline short and sweet is a great way to increase the success of your newsletter. Mailchimp suggests keeping your subject line at around 9 words and below 60 characters in order to keep attention. Plus, it prevents your subject from being too long to fit on the page.
Use visuals
We should all know by now that we are moving in a more visual direction as a society. Words aren’t as effective as infographics and pictures. Because of this, including graphics, images, and videos on your newsletter can drastically increase the interactions you get. People are more interested when they see bright, beautiful colors and a nice layout.
Newsletters can be extremely helpful, or extremely unsuccessful depending on how you execute on them. There are a number of tactics that can improve your newsletter game. Try some of them out and see how much traction they get.
Find out how Ascent can create and run your newsletter here.
