19 essential elements for creating successful email newsletters

Email marketing campaigns remain an essential tool in any online marketing strategy. The process of creating email newsletters has become more complex over the years, but there are a wide variety of frameworks and email builders to help. To create and maintain effective campaigns you need to keep in mind a few essential elements regarding:

Essential elements regarding the content

1. An engaging subject line

The subject line of an email newsletter is more important than you might think. This is the first piece of content that the subscriber sees when you send your campaign. A good subject line increases the open rate, so your campaign has a greater chance to fulfil its objective. As a rule of thumb, if you don’t want your campaign to end up in the spam folder, you should avoid using capitals and certain words. Here is a very good article that lists the words you should avoid.

2. Easy to read content

Content writers often believe that more is better. It is true in many situations, but not in the case of email campaigns. Remember that you have a limited and often a very short window of time to grab the user’s attention.

You can create easy to read content by following a few basic rules:

• Use non-academic language. Use words that the average person can understand without much effort
• Split your content into sections and use short sentences. Every section should have its own header.
• Use numbers and lists
• Keep the content as short as possible, but maintain the core information you want to transmit. Here is a handy tool to check your content’s readability

3. WIIFM — What’s in it for me

So you created your campaign, design is great and the content is brilliant, but you always have to ask: What’s in it for the person that opens your email? What’s in it for them? People don’t care about your products or services if it’s not beneficial for them. WIIFM could be an exclusive product or service, a reduced price only through the email campaign, something that gives the user an advantage by interacting through your newsletter.

4. Sense of urgency or scarcity

The secret of effective email newsletters is the sense of urgency or scarcity. This is what makes people click that call to action button. You need to remind users that if they want to act, they need to do it quickly, because at some point in time the offer you promote will expire or will not be available.

The sense of urgency can be achieved in a few and effective ways:

• Set a deadline — remind users that the offer you are promoting will end soon. For example: “offer end in 2 days” or “offer valid until Friday”
• Create scarcity — When approaching this strategy, you need to be honest and open with your users regarding the limited supply of your products or services. You can use phrases like: “Only 10 left in stock”, “buy it before it’s gone”
• Urgency in the subject line — This approach informs subscribers from the start that what you are offering is limited. Users know from the beginning that the action needs to be immediate. You can use the following words: “Act now”, “limited time offer”, “last chance”, “Don’t miss” etc.

5. Content relevance

You always have to ask yourself if the content is relevant to your target audience. Is the content that you present, will make users interested in your products or services? Remember that you have a limited time to grab attention, so make the best of it. Content relevance goes hand in hand with WIIFM.

Essential elements regarding design

6. Relevant imagery

Only use images to reinforce or enhance the content in order for the user to be more engaged with your email campaign. Because a lot of email clients by default don’t display images, it’s always a good rule of thumb to add an alternative text to your visuals.

Use images when it’s needed and only in certain and limited circumstances use images to replace text. For example, when you want to insert a creative header, from which your email newsletter might benefit.

Also use optimal image sizes and compress the images as much as possible. On the web file size is expensive, both financially and time wise, especially if people open emails on mobile.

7. Call to action

A good call to action (CTA) grabs attention and make people click. You should use a main CTA for your main product or service and secondary CTAs for your secondary products and services.

CTAs can be either built using HTML code or by using an image. The downside of the second option is the possibility of the user to not see it straight away because the email client might disable images by default. If you still want to use an image as a CTA, always add an alternative text attribute.

If you want to use code in order to build your CTA buttons, Campaign Monitor has a great online too to achieve this — Bulletproof Email Buttons

8. Clean and simple layout

A good email newsletter design is simple and clean. Don’t use more than 3 or 4 columns when building your layout. More than that and the layout will become too cluttered. Also try to create a clear distinction between sections of your email, so users can figure out the relations between the content.

9. Company branding

When building your email newsletter keep in mind to use your company’s branding: logo, colours, similar font, specific imagery etc.

Use no more than 2 fonts (headings and body text) and no more than 3 colours (primary, secondary and body text).

Also add the company logo (with a link to the website) in the header and footer. The header is the first thing users see when opening your emails, so the connection needs to be immediate.

10. Using a solid template

Build a solid, responsive and cross-client compliant email template and use it as a backbone for your email newsletters. Make it flexible enough to adapt to different campaign requirements. Sometimes you need to add or remove sections in your newsletter, depending on what you want to promote.

Don’t use completely different layouts or templates every time you send a campaign. You will get users confused and miss one of the important reasons you send email newsletters — building a relationship.

Also building new templates is time consuming, and you don’t want to waste precious resources. Instead focus on delivering high quality content. As a bonus, you can download for free a template that I developed for email newsletters.

11. Social media integration

When sending out a campaign always add links to your social media platforms. Most email campaigns use social media links in the footer or at the end of the email, but if you have space, also use these links in the header. By the end of the day social media is to consolidate your relationship with your audience.

12. Mobile friendly design

I don’t think I have to explain this, but responsive email newsletters are a must. More people open emails on their phones rather than on desktops or laptops. iOS has a very good support for responsive emails, and recently Gmail started to support it. It’s not easy to build a solid responsive email template, but the benefits worth it.

13. Testing the layout

Always test your email thoroughly before sending the campaign. Remember that building email newsletters is not the same as building websites, even if you use HTML. Some HTML tags and CSS selectors are not supported, and always use inline styles when you send out your campaigns for maximum compatibility. A rule of thumb is to test your campaigns on as many devices and email clients as possible. Most email delivery platforms offer the option to test your campaigns on different email clients for a reasonable fee. Alternatively, Inbox Inspector is a free tool that let you test your email campaigns on different email clients and devices.

Essential elements regarding the audience

14. Know your audience

Knowing your audience is key when starting an email marketing campaign. You should grab as much information as possible so you could send more targeted campaigns in the future.

15. Tracking

Tracking your emails is a must and most email delivery platforms use it by default. The most common tracking for emails are: opens and click throughs. The collected data is very important in order to measure your campaign performance over time.

16. Personalisation

If you want to stand out from the crowd and build a better relationship with your subscribers, you need personalisation. The personalisation should be at least the salutation. You can achieve this by using merging tags that most email delivery platforms support.

17. Segmentation

There is no such thing as one size fits all when it comes to sending email campaigns. With platforms like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor etc. it’s very easy to create segments within your lists. In general, segmentation is filtering or segmenting your general list in smaller lists based on some pre-defined rules.

If you collect only the basic data for your mailing list (name and email) you can do segmentations based on generic user activity: open rate, click rate, opening time etc.

If you collect additional data (more than name and email address) then, you can create a more in depth segmentation, based on gender, demographics, special interest etc.

18. A/B Testing

A/B testing or split testing is used when you need to decide on the effectiveness of a variable in your email newsletters. On most platforms you can use variables like: subject lines, headlines, content, CTAs, images etc., basically everything that an email newsletter is composed of.

Always test one thing at a time in order to get the best results. For example, when you test imagery, do just that, don’t also test body text because the results might be misleading.

Best practices in split testing include:

• Test often in order to get the best and most clear results possible
• Test the two email newsletter variations at the same time (in case you are not testing delivery times)
• Analyse the results: open rate, click rate, conversion etc.

19. Recycle email campaigns

After you sent a hard worked email campaign, don’t just forget it and wait for the results. With segmentation, tweaking the content and the subject line, you can re-send your newsletter to the subscribers that didn’t opened in the first campaign. This technique can be implemented for companies that don’t send email newsletters that often. The time between the initial campaign and the recycled campaign should be around one week, after the initial campaign cooled off. Also it’s not recommended to use recycled campaigns for offers that expire in a very short period of time.