9 Actionable Tips for Creating Email Newsletters that Get Read (2023 Guide)
What makes a good email newsletter?
Is it the design? The copy? The theme of the email, or does it all depend on how the recipient is feeling on that particular day?
Sometimes it depends on the content you put out, and other times how your recipients choose to take it. But for the most part, copy and email design determine if your email gets read or shoved to the abyss of other spam emails in the league of bank fraud and lottery wins emails.
We’ve put together this quick but handy guide with all the tips and advice you need to stand out in your recipients’ inbox. We cover everything from the subject lines down to your final CTA.
Let’s get to it.
The 9 Essential Tips You Need to Create an Effective Email Newsletter
#1. It Starts With The Subject Line
The email subject line is the first thing a recipient notices when they receive an email. It goes without saying that it should be interesting and snag attention at first sight. In fact, 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone.
Your email newsletter subject lines should be:
- Relevant— Does your email subject line reflect the recipients’ needs and wants?
- Valuable— Are you sending something unique they can’t easily find anywhere else?
- Interesting— Would your recipients want to read it? Does the subject line stir their curiosity?
If you achieve all three, you’ve hit the goal of a good subject line. If not, you can make some tweaks in your next email to boost the open rate. For instance;
- Add some personality in the subject line through emojis or humor
- Personalize the email by referencing the recipient’s name (email personalization can increase the open rate by 50%)
- Ensure the subject line is something your recipients care about or find interesting
- Make it short(most email marketing software will let you know the optimum character count)
Don’t you want to know why Kansas would give free land? That’s what a catchy subject line does. It captures people’s attention immediately.
Contrary to what people believe, writing the email subject line in all CAPS is not a smart move. It’s annoying at best and a step closer to the spam category at worst. Likewise, an awful lot of punctuation puts you through to the spam group for most email service providers.
#2. Let’s Talk About the Copy
Like I mentioned earlier, email copy and design are two crucial aspects of a newsletter that determine its success. The most successful email newsletter utilizes words to take readers on a journey from one step to the other. Here are 5 copy tips to use when creating your email newsletter:
Start Boldly
Starting your newsletter with interesting email content will generate the recipients’ interest from the word go. If your newsletter includes the month’s blog post, start with the most interesting post.
Make it Succinct
Short sentences and paragraphs work best for emails, just as they do for blog posts. Utilize large, clear-to-read fonts, and ensure there’s lots of whitespace from one paragraph to the next.
Take the Reader on a Journey
Remember, the Newsletter is not usually the end goal. You want the recipient to go to your website, visit a landing page, or purchase from your store. With this in mind, you can craft copy that clearly takes the recipients from one step to the next until they take the desired action.
Hubspot’s Newsletter copy is succinct, straight to the point, and they utilize lots of white space, making it easy to read.
Here's your no fluff guide to creating and formating newsletters.
#3. Don’t Be Overly Promotional
Chances are, you’ve come across that one company that keeps sending promotional emails daily. It’s not fun, and so if you’re like me, you keep archiving the emails, and once you’ve had enough, you unsubscribe altogether. Don’t be that annoying and overly promotional company.
Promoting your products and services at every chance in every newsletter is off-putting to your recipients. After all, a newsletter’s main aim is to educate and inform first. Promotion is a secondary theme that you should sprinkle sparingly.
Always try to balance between promotion and education in your newsletter. This way, when it’s time to self-promote, your recipients are not bogged down by the hundreds of promotional newsletters you had sent earlier.
#4. Be Authentic and Personal
Think back to the emails in your inbox. Which ones have you read from start to finish?
Now, think about why you have no qualms reading the entire email.
Chances are it’s because the email is relevant, catchy, and most of all authentic. It doesn’t matter whether the newsletter covers the latest blog posts or the just-released product features— you still read it without fail.
The most likely reason is that the email is engaging and authentic. You feel like part of the organization. Or at least, you feel like you share some values or personality with the sender. Maybe the email is humorous, witty, casual, or has some instances of sarcasm.
That’s what we call authenticity and personality.
The average office worker receives 100 emails or more per day. That’s a lot of competition to keep up with. If you want to stand out from the emails in your recipients’ inbox, be authentic, and definitely, don’t be afraid of being personal.
In addition, more customers (86%) expect authenticity from businesses. The best way to cultivate this authenticity is to infuse it into all parts of your business, especially constant communication channels like email newsletters.
#5. Have One Primary CTA
Let me let you in on something.
Too many options cause indecision. And it goes the same for your email newsletter. Yes, part of what makes a newsletter is the many sections and different calls to action available. However, if you have multiple prominent CTAs, most recipients won’t take action because they’ll be second-guessing on which to choose.
So, for every email, have only one prominent CTA you want recipients to take action on. You can sprinkle other CTAs throughout the newsletter, but ensure that the primary CTA is clear and accessible. A good rule of thumb is to place your prominent CTA at the top, middle, and bottom as you close the newsletter.
#6. Be Consistent with Your Branding
If I mention MacDonalds right now, your mind will most likely shift to the theme colors of yellow and red. Even if you’re not a fan of heavy carbs, there’s one lesson you can take from MacDonald’s when writing your email newsletter: Be consistent with your branding— emails included.
Your emails should carry the same level of consistency you try to have in other aspects of your business. First, it will help your target audience see the newsletter as coming from a familiar brand. And second, consistent branding in your emails will boost customer trust. In addition, studies have shown that consistent branding increases revenue by 33%.
When creating your newsletter, keep the colors, personality, and imagery consistent with each email newsletter. You can also have one or two email newsletter templates to save you time while ensuring that you achieve brand consistency.
#7. A Person, Not just a List
Want your newsletter to fall flat? Think of your subscribers as a list and not people. In fact, this is one of the most common mistakes businesses make. They focus too much on growing their email contact list and forget that it’s more about the people than the numbers. But there's a more superior way to make even more people read and subscribe to your newsletter.
For instance, if you own a real estate agency, your email list will consist of a diverse set of people with unique needs, preferences, and different reasons for subscribing. You might have:
- Jeremy, who’s looking to move into his first apartment
- Dave, who has a wife, 2 dogs, kids and just moved into his first home, a 3-bedroom single-family house
- Anna, who’s looking to sell her apartment and move to the suburbs
All these people are looking for different things when they subscribe to your newsletter. Jeremy might be interested in topics about moving into a first apartment, saving up for rent, and renters’ agreements.
On the other hand, Dave may be more interested in HOA guidelines, furnishing a family home, or increasing the value of his home. Yet, on the other hand, Anna will be more interested in email updates on tips for selling a town complex or the documentation needed for selling a home.
If you disregard each of these individual needs, you risk sending irrelevant bulk emails. In turn, the lack of understanding customer needs will result in frustrated recipients and possible unsubscriptions.
However, if you optimize email segmentation, you’ll send more personalized emails, which will boost your open rates and, ultimately, the email click-through rate. Even better, ensure that you ask for consistent feedback from your customers.
You can send out surveys quarterly to find out whether your content is relevant and valuable to them. If not, ask your recipients which kind of content they would rather receive.
#8. Email Accessibility is Still Crucial
1 in 4 people in the US has some form of disability. As you think of email newsletter UX, remember to make the experience seamless for people with sight, visual and hearing impairments. Here are some quick tips you can start implementing in your next newsletter email campaigns :
- Use responsive email templates. This ensures that the font and visuals are clear regardless of screen size. Responsive emails also make it easy to adjust fonts and images.
- Ensure sufficient color contrast. You can use black and white colors for crucial information and a mix of your brand colors for non-key information.
- Use alt text for images. Likewise, provide summaries for videos if you have included any.
#9. Make ‘Unsubcribe’ Option Accessible
What now?
Yes, it’s a hard pill to swallow, but not all your email subscribers want to stay for your email newsletter campaigns. And it’s a good thing.
Think of giving recipients the option to unsubscribe as the weeding process. For your email contact list to be healthy and productive, you’ll need to weed out the incompatible recipients. If you have a huge list, but a low open rate, the email service provider may mark your email newsletters as spam, thanks to lower deliverability rates.
If you fail to make the unsubscribe button accessible, most users would flag your email campaigns as spam, and your deliverability rates will suffer. This hurts your company more than if you simply provided a way to opt-out.
Like Linkedin, your unsubscribe button should be easily visible, and if possible, a different color from your standard text color.
To avoid being flagged as spam because of low open rates, ensure you have the unsubscribe link visible. Most newsletters have it at the bottom of the email newsletters. It’s also good to make it a different color or just bold the text.
Perfecting Email Newsletters Takes Time and Testing
Hopefully, these email newsletter tips and advice will help you create better newsletters. However, creating a newsletter with excellent engagement takes time and lots of testing. Make sure to continually test the copy, subject lines, email design, CTAs, and even the type of personalization used. The data you gather over time will enable you to determine how to design, format, and write your email newsletters.
That said, let’s not ignore the facts. Creating compelling email newsletters takes time. Time you don’t have while running the other equally important aspects of your business. Lucky for you, Zoey Writers can help. We work with businesses like yours to create engaging email newsletters that accomplish your desired goals. Check out our content writing services or contact us to get started.
