Newsletters are an excellent way to communicate with your customers on a regular basis, but if you want to ensure yours gets read, you’ll need to be strategic about how you present them. Read on for some tips as to how you can create newsletters that keep your readers engaged and eager to read more about your business.
What makes great newsletters?
Great newsletters are built on providing subscribers with timely, relevant content. Many newsletters fall short because they’re too salesy or don’t provide the information your subscribers wanted to read when they initially signed up. Regularly review where your subscribers came from, the boxes they ticked when they signed up, and your unsubscribe rate.
Start with people
When you are writing your newsletter, think about your customers first. What type of things do they want to know? What will interest them? What will make them come back for more? When you answer these questions, you can determine what topics you should be covering in your newsletter. Start with people, not products or services. It’s important that they come away from your newsletter feeling they have read something valuable.
Focus on one topic
It’s easy to muddy the waters by cramming a lot of information into one newsletter, but this is a sure-fire way of increasing your unsubscribe rate. Give customers one valuable topic on a regular basis and you are more likely to keep them. For example, if you run writing workshops, offer a newsletter with tips about how to overcome writers’ block. If you work in sales, perhaps news of special sales promotions would be useful to your audience.
Keep it short
Lengthy newsletters do have their place—especially when you have a specific message that requires a lot of context. But if you’re writing about general topics or news in your industry, keep it short and sweet. No one wants to scroll through thousands of words in a newsletter. And plain English is key; keep your paragraphs short, your sentences simple, and your words straightforward.
Use visuals
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? When it comes to newsletters, that’s certainly true. Research shows that an engaging newsletter, such as one with lots of visuals (like photos and graphs), can increase click-through rates as humans process visuals more easily. To create a more engaging newsletter, make sure you add in some high-quality graphics.
