Email Newsletters Your Audience will Actually Read

Email newsletters are among the most common ways that brands try to keep in touch with their audience. They can be a great way to share new news, extend the life of your older content, and stay top of mind for your prospects and customers. That is, of course, if anyone actually reads them. With open and click-through rates hovering around 20%-25% and 3%-5%, respectively, most of your audience won’t even see your email newsletter content, let alone engage with it. So what are some strategies to help improve your email newsletter content and that chances that they’ll be read?

First, Do You Need One At All?

Don’t get us wrong -- we believe in the value of email newsletters, and we send one out ourselves. That said, as with any other project, it’s prudent to do some preliminary research to see what others are doing in your industry. Which companies are thought of as your respective thought leaders? What content do they include in their email newsletters? And do you have the budget and time to allocate the proper resources to compete? Assuming that you can compete and add value by sending one out, your next step should be to define the goals for your email newsletter. Are you trying to generate new leads, convert existing leads into clients, retain existing clients on longer-term service agreements, or simply share information that reinforces your position? Finally, gather data, devise an evidence-based plan of action, and begin to shape the structure of your email newsletter.

Focus, Focus, Focus

Too many email newsletters are an amalgamation of content that’s only loosely connected at best. This can be a particular problem in a business with many stakeholders -- in an effort to include everyone, the content loses its focus and doesn’t provide enough depth for anyone. Like any other piece of content, your email newsletters need a single goal and every component of it should work together towards achieving that goal. Similarly, you can choose instead to focus on a single topic and include different perspectives or areas of concentration within that topic. When we’re sending out our email newsletters, we like to choose a particular theme and then share content on that theme from our archives. Aligning your content with a specific interest greatly increases the chance of audience engagement. And to help you maintain focus…

Keep Design and Copy to a Minimum

By their nature, email newsletters can easily appear cluttered and disorganized no matter how valuable the content or tightly it’s focused. To help avoid this, Hubspot recommends two things:

Concise copy is key -- because you don’t actually want to have your subscribers hang out and read your email all day. You want to send them elsewhere (your website or blog, for instance) to actually consume the whole piece of content. Concise copy gives your subscribers a taste of your content -- just enough that they want to click and learn more.   White space is [also] key in email newsletters because it helps visually alleviate the cluttered feel, and on mobile, makes it much easier for people to click the right link.

Strike a Balance

Just like your other content marketing efforts, the goal of your email newsletters should be to add value for your audience, not solely to promote your products or services. That promotion should be implicit in the value you provide. That said, you do still want your audience to engage with your email newsletter content, so we still recommend including a strong and clear call to action. And speaking of your call to action…

Have One Primary Call to Action

Sharing different pieces of content will mean that you’ll have different calls to action to drive readers to those pages. However, they shouldn’t necessarily share equal prominence. Instead, we recommend that you include one single primary call to action; thinking back to the goal of your email newsletter, this call to action should be the one thing you want your audience to do. Also, don’t hesitate to include it at multiple logical points throughout the email.

Test, Test, and Test Again

No amount of well-intentioned advice is a substitute for the actual data you glean from your own experiences with your own audience, so every email newsletter you deploy is a learning opportunity for you to help improve your next one. And by simply randomly segmenting your list, you can conduct ongoing A/B tests and change a different variable with each deployment. Try different subject lines, slight variations to your designs, copy or image changes, or different calls to action -- either in their language or placement. Keep track of your results and continually refine them with each subsequent deployment until you’re maximizing the potential of your specific audience.