5 Tips For Crafting The Perfect Email Newsletter
Posted by Sylvia Arce on Tue, Sep 11, 2012
Sending email newsletters is a great way to stay connected with your prospects, nurture leads and leverage your marketing efforts. However, some people are bored with newsletters that are generic and of the fits-all-sizes type. What do prospects want to hear and what’s in it for them? Certainly not your latest company news that has nothing to do with the product or service your prospects are looking for. Nor your long-winded lecture that sounds like an academic research paper.
Crafting a successful email newsletter is both an art and a science. It should be as pleasing and entertaining as it is informative and insightful, as personalized as it is business-like. Striking this delicate balance may not be easy because each prospect is unique. The most important thing to remember is to put your prospects in the center of your newsletter. This is for them, not for you.
When crafting your newsletter, consider the following tips:
1. Impress your audience with your subject line. Your subject line is the gateway to your newsletter. In not more than 50 characters, it should be able to elicit excitement and create a sense of urgency. Give your readers reason to make them want to read more. While keeping it short and specific, be sure to include the most vital information you want to convey. Asking an intriguing question, challenging your reader to make a choice or veering away from conventional knowledge are good ways to engage your audience.
2. Focus on a specific goal. A newsletter is most effective when there is a clearly defined purpose. While you may have unlimited options for topics to communicate, avoid crowding a single newsletter issue with a chaotic mixture of product promotion, company news, press releases, case studies and white papers. Focus on a specific material and stick to it. This way, readers can better absorb and process what you want them to know one topic at a time.
3. Involve and engage your prospects. Newsletters can be as effective as blogs and social media. Make your readers feel that they are a part of the content by appealing for their participation in user-generated content like answering questions or giving feedbacks and comments. Most Internet savvy searchers frequent social media channels. You can use your Twitter account, for instance, to announce your latest newsletter and provide a sign-up tab and a link to a web version of that newsletter.
4. Prepare a customer-centric newsletter. Again, this newsletter is not for you but for your customers. It should clearly address their needs. It should, thus, be written from customers’ perspectives. Know what is important to them. This can be determined from their previous downloads or subscription sign-up profiles. They can be busy company executives, working mothers, professionals or students who can be reading from an office computer, laptop or a mobile device.
5. Write a compelling call-to-action. After reading your newsletter, your readers should not leave wondering “what’s next”. Lead them to your call-to-action button that contains a short and clear instruction like “Request Appointment”, “Contact Us” or “Request Quote”. Avoid too many options because they confuse readers. This should be positioned in a visible location in an attractive design and vivid color. The bottom line is that it should be easy to locate and click.
Measuring user engagement is critical in understanding the usefulness of newsletters. Not everyone reads newsletters and if you find out that a mere 10% of your targets are reading them, something must be wrong somewhere. You can then redesign your strategy until you are able to craft the perfect email newsletter.