Email newsletters can be very effective tools for staying in touch with workers, clients or even random website visitors.
Unfortunately, bland or boring newsletters either end up being fed to the spam filter or being dropped completely. This doesn’t do you any good, and it certainly doesn’t help your company or brand. You need to pep things up, and fast.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can improve your email newsletter.
Here are just a few suggestions on how to turn your newsletter into an email that people actually want to read:
- Give It Personality
No one wants to read dry copy.
Your email newsletter should have personality and ideally should be conversational in tone. This doesn’t mean that you should include slang or be overly casual; even newsletters for personal websites should have at least a little bit of professional decorum. Just make sure that you don’t go too far into making things professional and wind up coming out dry or stuffy.
- Visual Thinking
A big wall of text doesn’t give readers much to look at.
If there’s too much text on the page, a lot of readers are just going to give up. Including a few images that are relevant to your topics can break things up, especially if you’re talking about things that are better conceptualized visually. Even if you don’t have relevant images to include, some brand-related pictures or other illustrations can go a long way toward making things readable (and enjoyable).
- Break It Up
Going along with the previous point, try to keep your paragraphs relatively short and break your content up into sections.
You can even use graphics to separate the sections! Even if you don’t use small images between your sections, relevant headings can help readers find the info they want without having to read through the whole newsletter. If you have more to say than can be covered in a short paragraph, write it up as an article on your website and include a summary and link in the newsletter.
- Set a Schedule
If you really want your readers to enjoy your newsletter, set a schedule so they’ll get your newsletter around the same time every time it’s delivered.
This is one place where an automated newsletter service can be really handy; not only will it manage your subscribers for you, but you can write your newsletters in advance and schedule them for not only specific dates but even specific times.
- Stay on Topic
Watch out for meandering when you write your newsletter.
It’s easy to get off track, especially when you have a lot to cover. This is another place where keeping things brief and broken up into different headings comes in handy. Still, make sure that you take the time to read over your newsletter before you send it to make sure that you didn’t stray from the newsletter’s central message.
- Bait the Hook
Wrap up each issue of your newsletter with a preview of what’s to come next time.
You don’t have to cover everything that will be in the next newsletter, especially since a good idea to leave a few things as a surprise. You should touch on at least two or three big topics that will be covered, though, since this will help build excitement in your audience and make them more likely to read the next issue.
- Test It Out
Don’t forget to send a test email to a private email address before it’s time to send your newsletter to test it out.
Check to see how all of your images look, scan over it to look for glaring mistakes and take notes on anything that looks weird. This gives you a chance to fix things before your email goes out to everyone and may give you ideas on how to improve your newsletter in the future as well.