Posted by This will sound familiar to most marketers. You’re sitting in a conference room, trying to figure out how to effectively engage your leads and customers, sell more items, or just “remain top-of-mind” for your target audience when someone suggests an email newsletter as a solution to all of those problems at once.
You’re suddenly “volunteered” to do it. You must also ensure that open and clickthrough rates do not decline. What can you do to overcome your anxiety, produce better newsletters, and be certain that your audience and readers will absorb all of the fantastic content you have for them?
Does it sound good?
Before diving in deep, we need to know a bit about the overview of Email newsletter design.
Everything that goes into making an email newsletter or promotional email is referred to as email newsletter design. This often includes:
- Subject lines and sender information
- Colors and branding
- Images and fonts
- Formatting
All of these factors contribute to designing an intriguing newsletter design template, but that’s not the end of it. Your newsletter design also contains items you can’t see, such as the newsletter’s goal & purpose.
That’s true, the design of your newsletter is determined by the goal you’re planning to achieve. For example, if you’re creating a weekly email, one of your goals may be to educate your readers. This newsletter design may differ significantly from an email designed to increase sales.
11 killer tips for writing an email newsletter
1. Create a catchy & enticing subject line
Subject lines may make or ruin your email marketing initiatives.
Approximately 47 percent of email users open an email solely based on the subject line. At the same time, 69 percent of email receivers will report an email as spam purely based on the subject line.
Here is one of the key steps you may do to make your subject lines clickable: Make topic lines that are mobile-friendly.
Mobile devices are used to check email more than webmail or desktop computers. Make sure your subject line and preheader look great on mobile devices.
2. Get the preview text right
It’s not simply the subject line that convinces/persuades the people to open your email with today’s email applications. It also serves as the preview text. This is the paragraph that informs subscribers about the content of your email.
This is frequently included as part of the opening line of the email. That’s great because most email copywriters carefully compose this.
However, if your preview text includes instructions on how to read the email online or unclickable links to your social network accounts, you’re wasting a chance. With email preview text ranging from 35 to 140 characters depending on the client, this is one of the most critical components of your email that you cannot afford to overlook.
3. Determine the type of newsletter you wish to send
One of the most significant issues with email newsletters is that they are frequently cluttered and distracting since they support every element of your organization. Product news appears with PR pieces, blog entries appear across a random event week… it’s a bit of a jumble. Email, whether it’s a newsletter or not, needs a common thread to keep it all together.
One technique to help craft a beautiful & aesthetic email newsletter is to limit it to a single topic. So, instead of being about your firm in general, it may be on a certain vertical.
4. Maintain your focus on your objective.
What do you hope to achieve with your newsletter?
Before you begin writing, this should be the first question you ask yourself. How will your subscribers know what to do if you don’t know the answer?
The following are some frequent objectives for email newsletters:
- Enhance social media presence and promote sales,
- Download an Ebook,
- Direct people to a landing page,
- Publicize a new product or service.
There might be a slew of different objectives for your firm. However, if you’re having trouble, utilize these to get started on the correct path.
Choose one and stick with it. Trying to put/insert all of this into a single statement is difficult and can confuse your viewers.
Accomplish some study beforehand to figure out what you need to do. Is there a successful email newsletter in your industry that people want to subscribe to? What’s the catch? Could you be successful with the resources you have at your disposal (money, time, and internal support)?
If your industry isn’t interested in email newsletters, or if your aims don’t align with what a newsletter can achieve, your time could be better spent building something else, such as a lead nurturing email process or blog material.
So gather some facts, make a plan of action (for a successful newsletter or another activity), and go talk to your superior/boss. Even if you disagree with his or her vision for an email newsletter, your supervisor will appreciate the fact that you came prepared with a strategy for success.
Let’s imagine you’ve decided to create an email newsletter. What comes next?
5. Make 90 percent of your mailing content informative and 10% commercial.
Your email newsletter subscribers probably don’t want to hear about your products and services all of the time.
For example, one of the email subscribers from a famous apparel company said that “I have a thing for shoes, and I particularly enjoy this one shoe site. I voluntarily subscribed to the company’s email list, but it now sends me emails 2–3 times each day urging me to purchase, buy, buy… I want to scream when I see the sender’s name appear in my inbox.
If they offered me instructional stuff, such as the latest shoe styles or how to match particular styles with specific outfits, I might be more motivated to buy from them, or at the very least check their emails again.”
According to Sungpill, an expert in the Web Design space, “Don’t push your business services all over. Get rid of the self-promotion in your email newsletters (most of the time) and focus on providing your readers with informative, relevant, and timely content. Leave out the promotional bits unless you have exciting, major news about your product, service, or company”.
6. Make use of psychology in your email marketing strategy
As humans, our brains are hardwired to respond predictably to specific sorts of data. As a result, applying psychology can assist you in creating more successful, high-converting email marketing copy.
Readers are influenced by a variety of things, including:
We have a fear of missing out (FOMO) because we never want to miss out on anything. That is why time-limited offers are so effective. More individuals will click if you use scarcity and urgency in your email. That also applies to curiosity.
Color selection is important because various hues provoke different emotions. This may be used efficiently, for example, in CTA buttons. Pictures of people’s features can provoke the emotions expressed in their expressions or draw the viewer’s attention to a CTA.
7. Select one main call to action
Okay, one of the things that distinguish a newsletter is that it has many pieces of information with various calls-to-action (CTAs). But it doesn’t imply you should give those CTAs equal weight.
Instead, make one major CTA — only one important thing you want your subscribers to accomplish. The remaining CTAs should be “in case you have time” alternatives. Make it as clear as possible for your subscribers to understand what you want them to do, whether it’s just clicking through to view a blog article or forwarding the email to a friend.
8. Keep design and copy to a minimum
Because of its nature, a newsletter, as previously said, can quickly feel crowded. The key to making email marketing appear clean is to use succinct language and enough white space in the design.
Concise text is essential since you don’t want your readers to sit and read your email all day. You want them to go somewhere else (like your website or blog) to digest the entire piece of material. Concise writing provides your readers just enough of a taste of your material to get them to click and learn more.
White space is important in email newsletters because it aesthetically alleviates the congested impression and makes it much easier for consumers to click the proper link on mobile. Just like one of the killer’s web design trends, email newsletter design should also adopt light & bold typography and a lot of white spaces.
Make It Scanning-Ready
Even if the emails are brief, receivers may not read them all. That is why it is critical to make them scannable.
This will be aided by the structure of your email newsletter. Because pictures capture people’s attention, where you place them has an impact on what they view.
You may organize the content into parts to make it visually evident where the most significant bits of information are.
You may also utilize subheadings and bullet points to keep readers reading and lead them to your call to action.
9. Ensure that pictures contain alt text
Given how crucial visual material is to the rest of your marketing efforts, it stands to reason that you’d want to include it in your emails, right?
Right. Email, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. Because most users will not have images enabled, you must ensure that your photos have one vital component: alt text. Alt-text is the text that shows in place of images when they aren’t loaded in an email. This is especially crucial if your CTAs are images; you want to ensure that users click even if the image is disabled.
10. Make it simple for them to unsubscribe
This may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s critical if you want to keep your subscriber list active and interested. Do not hide an unsubscribe button behind a picture that lacks alt text. Aside from keeping your list healthy, having a clear unsubscribe method can assist in guaranteeing that your email isn’t declared SPAM before it reaches the inboxes of the rest of your list.
The best practice includes keeping the unsubscribe link bolded and capitalized, making it very easy for you to click on it (if you wanted).
11. Test, test, and test again
I know I just gave you ten things to do to ensure you’re crafting email newsletters in the right way, but you also need to figure out what works for your company and your list. Various types of email users have different preferences, just as varied cultures have different preferences.
So, as a starting point, adopt these email newsletter best practices… then experiment to discover your secret sauce. Here is one of the ideas to get you started:
Subject Lines That Are Short and Funny
Your subject lines should all be on the short side. (It works better this way.) But have you ever tried injecting some levity into your copy? It may bring a grin to your recipients’ faces. Try this today !!
Summary
Please keep in mind that our target customers are getting at least 10–15 emails in a day, most of them are non-valuable to the users or it is over promotional. It is very essential for a company to add value to its user base and companies need to follow & adopt these tips in their Email marketing campaigns.