Company newsletters can take many different forms: product announcements, educational resources, internal company news, employee interviews, and much more. Given the multitude of options that a newsletter offers, how do you know which format to use for your clients? And, more importantly, what kind of email newsletter do your clients actually want to read?
Keep in mind that a newsletter might not be right for your company. So before you dive into the nitty gritty of content curation and creation, ask yourself whether your audience would be interested in reading what you put together. If the answer is yes, read on to learn six easy tips to creating an effective and engaging newsletter.
1. Determine Your Audience
Although it can be tempting to send your email newsletter to every contact in your database, let’s pump the brakes for a minute. As emphasized in account-based marketing, the best kind of content is highly targeted, not sprayed to every person with an email address. The latter approach assumes that your recipients (1) will read the content and (2) won’t mark it as spam. Consider it from your point of view: if you’ve ever received unsolicited emails from companies, chances are you’re already taking measures to ensure that it won’t happen again.
That said, it’s best practice to narrow the scope of your target audience. You might consider segmenting groups to widen the scope of your reach (i.e., prospects, current clients, past clients, etc.), but keep in mind this will require different content for each group. If you’re looking for one place to begin, we recommend sending content to current clients. This way, you can get their honest feedback on your content before you widen your reach.
2. Create an Effective Template
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every single time you send a newsletter—and doing so is simply a waste of time. Fortunately, many CRM systems allow you to create email newsletter templates that you can reuse.
Finding the best layout for your newsletter may take a few tests. Ultimately, you want a format that communicates your message in the most effective and straightforward way possible. We suggest starting with the most relevant news first and then working your way down.
3. Follow the 90/10 Rule
While it’s tempting to spend an entire newsletter talking about the great things your company is doing, a good rule of thumb is to keep the content mostly educational. Specifically, best practices call for 90% educational content (such as blogs or industry articles) and 10% promotional content. This isn’t to say your clients don’t care about your company, but they are looking for solutions to their problems first and foremost. And while it’s cool that your company may have gotten a new arcade game in your break room, chances are your clients will scroll right past that information in favor of something more relevant to their interests.
4. Tease Text with Links
Once you’ve collected all of the content you want to include in your newsletter, you may realize that your newsletter has a lot to say. While this isn’t a bad thing, we recommend reducing the amount of scrolling your readers need to do by teasing certain sections and then including a “read more” link for them to follow. This helps you cut down on the length of the email and track what your audience is reading so you can make content adjustments going forward.
5. Use Creative Subject Lines
Writing a catchy subject line might be the hardest part of creating an email newsletter. It can be tempting to be very straightforward about your subject lines (“ABC Company April Newsletter 2018”), but think about it from your clients’ perspectives: would you open an email that sounds like it will put you to sleep? That said, it will likely take you a few iterations to find your subject line sweet spot, but once you figure out the formula to positive open rates, writing that short copy will get much easier.
6. Pick One Call to Action
In the end, you’re not just sending out a newsletter so your readers are better informed–you’re also trying to compel them to take some sort of action. As to not overwhelm your audience with options, we recommend you focus on one (and only one!) call to action so it’s clear what you want your audience to do. Call you? Email you? Submit a form? Whatever it is, make sure your readers know to take action.
Contact us today for more information about creating an effective and engaging email newsletter.
Take me home!
Read more blogs.