Properly done, newsletters can be a wonderful way to get your message out to your clients; to keep in contact; to increase engagement; and to advertise your products or services. However, it’s all too easy to get it wrong and if you do the penalties can range from the relatively small such as loss of engagement or a few unsubscribes to in extreme cases, alienating clients and monetary fines or legal action stemming from bad subscriber management practices. Here’s 3 of the main areas that come into play when you’re trying to create a newsletter:
1. Get the list right
- A good list is not necessarily a big one. It’s far better to have a small list of really engaged readers than a huge list that doesn’t even open your emails.
- Make sure you have received permission to send the emails, and that you’re obeying all the relevant laws. If you’re in Australia, the Australian Communications and Media Authority has some great information on topics such as: Spam Legislation, Spam FAQ, Definitions and types of Consent and Ensuring you don’t spam.
- Don’t forget you may need to be able to prove that your subscribers requested to be added to your list – so record keeping is important. The easiest way is to use a program that stores that information for you (i.e. MailChimp, Aweber etc.)
2. Make it pretty
Make sure you take design into consideration. Use a Theme if your software provides them so you keep the basic look consistent. Watch out for:
- Huge chunks of text, with no breaks will probably not be read. So make sure you use short sentences, have paragraph breaks and spacing that makes it easy to read.
- Be aware that some email programs don’t display images by default, so make sure that the content is enticing enough that people will want to download pictures. Better yet, make sure your newsletter is not dependent on images.
- Remember that mobile is getting more and more popular, so keep mobile in mind when you’re making design decisions.
- Make sure you provide a text only version. Generally you should be able to just grab the text from the html newsletter, however if you use a lot of graphics and html formatting it’s worth taking the time to format the text only version separately.
3. Content is king
There’s a reason you keep hearing that phrase. If you don’t have great content in every newsletter, you’ll lose subscribers. The more connected your readers are, the more likely it is that they’ll forgive a newsletter that’s a bit light on content, but no matter how connected people are, nobody will keep being an active subscriber if you don’t give them good content on a regular basis. It really doesn’t matter whether they unsubscribe, or continue to receive your newsletters without opening them, if you’re not providing content that engages your audience, you might as well not bother. Some of the things to keep an eye on are:
- Content that is relevant to your audience. Use metrics, responses and customer surveys to see what people like, what gets clicked on and what doesn’t and what people are responding to. Make sure that the majority of your content is quality content and don’t be tempted to add filler just to make a newsletter seem to have more. It won’t fool anybody.
- Make sure any facts and figures you quote are correct. If you can’t find a source that you trust, don’t use them.
- Proofread, proofread, proofread. If it’s not your forte, ask someone else to.
- Don’t set a publishing schedule you won’t be able to keep up with. A weekly newsletter is not a good idea if nothing ever changes, look at fortnightly, or even monthly. Consider whether you might be better off producing ad hoc emails when you have something important to share.
If you keep all these factors in mind, you should find your emails are being read by more of your subscribers and your list is driving actions that increase your brand reputation and in turn increase your sales.
