5 Tips to Create Engaging and Compelling Newsletters
While there is no denying the effectiveness of newsletters as a marketing resource, if your content fails to engage and resonate with recipients, it will not help your campaign.
The good news is that you can find inspiration in some of the best newsletter examples and templates to create relevant and eye-catching newsletters of your own. But, as long as you offer a good balance of brand news, product information, deals, discounts, and other customer-friendly content, your newsletters should get results.
It’s important to make them a part of your marketing repertoire because newsletters help build your reputation, ultimately helping you boost sales and improve your bottom line.
Here are the essentials of engaging and compelling newsletters that entice readers and turn them into actual paying customers:
Make Your Newsletters less Salesy
Newsletters provide you with the avenue to demonstrate your thought-leadership and expertise in relevant areas. However, don’t let your newsletters be thinly-veiled sales pitches because the audience will see right through the façade.
Instead, include relevant and exciting content to persuade the recipient to read through. However, if they see an apparent attempt to get a sale, they may ignore the newsletter and unsubscribe altogether.
So a successful newsletter should provide valuable information to subscribers, such as news updates, tips, research, special offers, etc. Almost anything that can inform and delight the recipient while delivering value. Your content must align with what interests the subscriber and what you promised to serve when they signed up.
Also, make sure that you categorize your audience by location, interests, buying habits, age, and more to help you generate newsletters with targeted content.
Leverage The Power Of An Appealing Design
Imagine a prospective buyer opening your newsletter after reading a subject line that promises a “great offer” or an “important news.” However, inside they are bombarded with massive blocks of text, images, clumsy animations that fail to load, and various topics contending to get their attention.
What would you do if something like that ended up in your inbox? The chances are that you’d never open another email from the sender again. Or worse, send all future emails to the spam folder.
As a marketer, you need to invest a reasonable amount of time to get the newsletter designs right. Avoid clutter and make your newsletter easy to navigate and scan. This is imperative in an age when over 40% of emails are opened on smartphone devices.
A practical and engaging newsletter will be consistent, well-designed, and aligned with the company’s branding but simple. Also, it is pivotal to optimize your newsletters for tablets and smartphones to minimize their risk of deletion or abandonment.
Craft Subject Lines That Are Impactful
Roughly 33% of people open emails depending on how impactful the subject line is. In comparison, 69% decide to report the emails as spam because of subject lines.
Therefore, your subject line should be relevant to the subscriber’s taste and the specific newsletter’s content. In addition, they should be brief enough to display in their entirety in the inboxes to prevent confusion.
A good subject line features a strong hook and active words to captivate the prospective client’s attention. They should be prominent from the rest of the marketing emails without being too complex, obscure, or cheesy.
Another crucial element in formulating a newsletter subject line is customization. For example, emails that address the subscriber by their name in the subject line get an open rate of about 18%, compared to 15% for those without the recipient’s name. In addition, adding “free” to your emails also make them 10% more likely to open it.
Determine The Newsletter Frequency
So, how often is it good to send the newsletters?
There is a delicate balance to get the newsletter frequency right. Companies risk irritating their customers. And subscribers might even forget about your particular brand or question your company’s credibility.
Research revealed that over 60% prefer to get a minimum of one marketing email from a brand every month, whereas 15% will be satisfied to get one every day. So it is good to send out one newsletter every week.
As a marketer, if you regularly publish blog posts, launch products, and take part in events, you will have much material to cover in your newsletters. Organizations moving at a gentler pace will not. There is not much sense in sending newsletters that don’t provide value to the intended readers.
Essentially, the frequency of sending your newsletters should depend on your business and the output. The key is to ensure transparency and be honest with your subscribers when signing up. This means to let them know when they will receive newsletters, i.e., twice per month, once per week, etc.
Offer Incentives To Increase Engagement
Include discount codes, links, special offers, and free downloads such as white papers, e-books, podcasts, etc., in your newsletters to make them engaging to the recipients.
Emphasizing this in your subject lines may increase the appeal of your newsletter and pique customers’ interest, encouraging them to browse the entire piece.
The freebies and discounts you add to your newsletter should appeal to subscribers and provide real value.
Incentives boost engagement, however, only when they are relevant and transparent. You should conduct research and segment your customers into groups that streamline this process. So, invite your subscribers to fill out a brief questionnaire on their preferences to figure out the appropriate strategy for their respective sections.
Conclusion
The art of creating engaging and successful newsletters requires time and effort to master and also involves rigorous A/B testing to get it right. Commit to email marketing, be patient and understand your target audience – that’s all it takes to get newsletters right.
