We see businesses quite often struggle with creating email newsletters or email promotions. It seems like they over think things and end up making what can be a simple process more complicated than it has to be.
Follow these four steps for creating email newsletters and email promotions and you’ll spend less time worrying over the wrong things. You’ll probably even write better newsletters too!
1. Find something helpful to your readers.
Take a look at things around your company that happened in the past month or are coming up in the next few weeks. There might be something useful or helpful for your readers.
Make sure you appeal to their problems and challenges and they will find your newsletter more interesting to read than if you write about your Company Employee Picnic.
2. Keep your layout very simple.
It’s all to easy these days to grab a template from an email service provider’s template list and go to town populating it with your copy and images. Or you might be tempted to get your designer to make an email newsletter look like your website. Don’t.
Make your email newsletter one column and you can put a small logo or banner at the top. Leave lots of white space in the copy. No more than three line paragraphs. Your readers will appreciate it.
3. Three stories only.
I sign up for many lists and often I’ll receive an email newsletter which is long. It might be over 1200 words or have a dozen stories in it. Lot’s of time often goes into preparing the content and doing the layout.
But people are busy when they get your email newsletter and they need to be able to read it quickly and get some benefit from it. You won’t be happy if you hear: “I got your newsletter and there was so much good stuff in it, I put it in a special newsletter folder to read later!” They won’t.
4. Plan your call to action before you put it all together.
You want someone to read your email sure, but you also want them to do something. Most common is to click on a link to your site. You might even want them to spend some money while there.
If you do, you need to plan this step first before you create your message. Make it clear what you want them to do and you’ll have a much higher chance they will follow through.
The best way to run your email newsletter campaign then is to take 30 minutes and plan it through following these steps. You’ll want to do this at least once per month but you can send more often if you have something to say. Remember, your emails will be shorter and because they are relevant to a reader they will be well received.
This process works for email promotions just as effectively as email newsletters. Don’t make the mistake of trying to combine the two.