Quick Tips for Writing Newsletters
Every email you send it competing with approx 120 others that the average office worker receives every day. Your audience will scan your newsletter (the average time people spend reading a newsletter is 51 seconds). Both of these stats mean that it is even more important for your content to be relevant, interesting and, above all, useful to them.
01. Plan your Newsletter
Think about what your customers want to read about. Plan and write your content based on what your customers read and what to read.
Decide what is important to your audience (not you) and put it at the top of the email.
Make sure that the content is mobile friendly as we read 49% of our email on mobile devices, so the shorter the better. Focus on just 2-3 topics or calls to action (CTAs) in each issue.
The design of your newsletter should make the content easy to read and navigate.
02. Write engaging content
Content should be concise and to the point. You want recipients to respond to your CTAs, so don’t make them read more than necessary.
Keep your content concise and engaging by:
- use interesting and eye-catching titles.
- limiting news items to two or three short sentences with a link to more information (on your blog or other websites).
- using original text in your newsletter (not just the copy from the linked page)
- keeping links to one or two per item, preferably at the end.
- using clear buttons / CTAs for your links (as it can be fiddly to click links on mobile devices when they are embedded in the text).
- sharing around 90% informative / interesting information and 10% promotional.
03. Get the subject line right
Like any good email, your newsletter needs a subject line that grabs attention as 35 percent of email recipients open email based on the subject line.
Tell your subscribers what they can find inside and include eye-catching titles. Keep it to under 41 characters (portrait view on an iPhone) and leave out the word ‘newsletter/e-newsletter’ – research has shown it decreases the open rate by over 18%
04. Measure and Review your Metrics
Measure measure measure. Don’t forget to review your metrics. At the very least, check:
- open rates. This will give you a rough idea of how many of the emails you sent were opened. If you get above 30% you are doing very well
- clickthrough rates. This will tell you how many times the links in your newsletter were clicked on. This is a good way of judging whether subscribers found your content interesting and responded to your CTAs
You can then use this data to work out what you might want to change or what content you need to create more of.
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Digital Marketing Strategy: Email Marketing
