Newsletters can be a great tool to keep customers informed about company news, improve brand awareness and build an ongoing relationship with your core audience. However, developing unique, relevant, valuable content on a periodic basis can be a time consuming and cumbersome task, particularly for a business owner who does not consider creative writing one of their core skills.
The VerticalResponse eMail Marketing Blog, which provided the inspiration for this article, has a lot of useful tips on how to successfully utilize Email Newsletters and other techniques to drive more business.
If you decide to utilize this tried and true marketing technique, here are 6 tips for creating an outstanding and memorable email newsletter:
- Keep it digestible: Gone are the days when a newsletter automatically equated to long, drawn out stories and articles. With today’s consumer, it’s better to break your newsletter content into short, digestible and actionable pieces, using a mix of written content, headlines, images and strong calls to action.
- Make it skimmable: Streamline your designs so that they can easily be digested, even if the customer only skims through the content. Use clear headers, aim for clean lines, and create visible breaks between your content.
- Remain transparent: Always include your contact information in an easy-to-find location within the newsletter. Part of this is to remain compliant with current anti-spam legislations, but the bigger – and better – purpose is to allow your newsletter to become a contact tool. If your current or potential customers feel inspired to reach out to you because of your newsletter, you want them to be able to find you. Another option includes adding your social profile links in either the header and/or the footer of your email newsletter.
- Be relevant: Newsletters should share information that would be of interest to your current or potential customer, so focus on that and not just on what you – as the company writing the email newsletter – wants to say.
- Consider timeliness: The best-performing newsletters provide timely information, advice, or promotions that make sense to the current needs to the customer. That could be tied to seasonal tips and trends, end-of-season clearance, new season arrivals, or tips on how to tackle something around the house that needs to be done NOW.
- The medium is NOT the message: Today’s email newsletters need to be easily consumed using a variety of devices, from a desktop computer to a mobile phone. In fact, according to the latest US Consumer Device Preference Report from MovableInk, mobile email opens surged to an all-time high in Q4. The report says that 66 percent of all email in the US is now opened/read on smartphones or tablets and 34 percent is viewed on a desktop. Therefore, it is crucial to make sure that your email newsletter can easily be read no matter what device your customer is on when they open your email.
The Bottom Line!
Creating a relevant email newsletter that customers look forward to receiving is not an easy task. But, with the right execution, it can become a very powerful tool in your online marketing arsenal.