If you're going to go through the trouble of creating email newsletters, you should at least make them something your customers actually want to read. Just put yourself in their shoes and follow these simple guidelines - soon you'll have them eating out of your hand.
1. Pick a specific topic
An email newsletter (e-letter) that supports every aspect of your business will end up coming off as unfocused. Its cluttered message is likely to lose your readers. If you've got product news next to public relations stories, random events next to blog posts, you've got yourself a real mess. You need to figure out one common thread to hold your whole e-letter together.
Dedicate your e-letter to one "vertical" each time and you'll maintain your customers' rapt attention.
2. Keep it high on education, light on promotion
Your e-letter readers don't want a perpetual sales pitch from you, even as much as they might love your products or services. Spend all your time selling and they're likely to tune out. If it's "buy, buy, buy" all the time you're going to lose them.
But, if you can give them some interesting educational content, some things related to what you have to sell and things you think they might want to know, they'll consider opening your emails with greater regularity. Give your subscribers relevant, timely info – unless you have something truly exciting and big to relay about your product.
3. Come up with creative email subject lines
Just because customers sign up for your e-letters doesn't mean they're going to open them when you send them out. It’s best to have a grabby, intriguing, engaging subject line for each electronic missive you transmit. Even successive numbering every issue might put them to sleep.
Think about the most interesting feature of the e-letter: what makes this one exciting or unique? Find some way of stating that in a fresh, original way that grabs attention and you'll get more of your subscribers actually reading what you send them.
4. Have one primary call-to-action
Variety in a newsletter may be good, but that can mean numerous pieces of content with a different call-to-action (CTA) for each one. That can work okay for maintaining interest, but the trick is in not letting each of those CTAs share equal prominence. What you want instead is one main action you'd like your subscribers to take per issue.
As for the rest of your CTAs, they should be secondary, "in-case-you-have-time" options. Do you want your subscribers to click through to super-neat blog posts, or to forward an email to somebody they know? Make it clear and easy for them to understand what it is you want them to do.
