5 Useful Tricks for Creating a Perfect Email Newsletter
Nowadays, newsletters are a great tool for attracting new customers, turning visitors into buyers, building a stable customers base, maintaining their loyalty and so on. So, how to create a newsletter that people will actually click and read?
“59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation.” (WordStream)
1. Be creative with email subject lines
When you receive new email notification, what is the first thing you notice? Why do you usually open it? In most cases, there are 2 most common things: the sender and the subject of the email.
If you are a company, you should try to send a newsletter in the name of a real person and not via a contact email as “info@(company).com”. For instance: If you want to receive feedback from your customers who have purchased in your online store, you should send them an email in the name of the person responsible for customer support. They will have a feeling that their opinion is what matters most to you.
HubSpot article “34 Sales Email Subject Lines That Get Prospects to Open, Read, and Respond” contains some great examples of how to create a perfect email subject line for your newsletter.
Here are some of the principles that follow:
- Ask them questions — Emails with question subject lines provoke opens and replies.
- If you collect not only email addresses but also subscriber names, include their name in the subject line.
- Ask for a feedback — For example: “Did you get what you were looking for?”. It works best for your website visitors.
- Numbers are the key — if you send a subscriber offer for a discount in your store, be sure to mention it in the subject line: “50% discount on ….”.
- Give your readers a sense of urgency — by using phrases such as “limited time”, “last change”, “…is almost over”, …
- “X tips for…” People love when someone offers them FREE tips or tricks. And they love numbered lists, too.
“Welcome emails are incredibly effective: on average, 320% more revenue is attributed to them on a per email basis than other promotional emails.” (WordStream)
2. Pick only 1 strong Call-to-action (CTA)
In my opinion, it is important to choose just 1 main goal you want to achieve — 1 main thing that you would like your subscribers to do. Visit your website? Use the coupon and buy something? Fill in your satisfaction survey or feedback form?
It is okay to have multiple calls-to-action in the newsletter, but the most important (and the most visibile) button should be just one — and should lead the subscriber only to the one goal.
3. Keep design minimal
Companies always want to say so much in newsletters and forget that subscribers do not want to read extremely long emails. So, what should you do? Provide only the most essential information and create a visually appealing design in which everyone is immediately orientated.
4. Create a clear footer
So, every footer in the newsletter should include:
- Your social profiles
- Your contact information
- Unsubscribe Link
- Privacy Policy
- Copywriting symbol, Year & Your brand name
Footer is the part at the bottom of the newsletter and should sum up information about you— where to find you and how to contact you. At the same time, it also gives the opportunity to learn more about your privacy policy or to ubsubscribe.
Do not be sad when someone unsubscribes. Try to find out the reason (For example: in MailChimp — subscribers have to choose the option why they do not want to receive your newsletters anymore) and learn from it.
5. Run A/B tests
You never find out what works for your subscribers until you test it. Different groups of email subscribers prefer different things and you have to find out what they want, in what they are interested and so on. It is not easy.
Here are a few things you can test:
- Email subject line
- Sending time
- CTA buttons (placement, color, text)
- Layot of individual elements (design)
- Sender (Do they respond better to a real person or corporate email address?)
Good advice:
Do not forget on analyzing & reporting.
You can send emails even every day but if you do not analyze their results and find you what your subscribers did or did not do, you will not be able to create a brilliant newsletter that will achieve your goals.
Therefore, you should always make enough time to create a brief report summarizing the results of the newsletter and containing improvements to the future.
Thank you for reading my article. Leave a comment if you have any questions.:)
