I’ve signed up for literally hundreds of email newsletters in the past few years in order to discover what others are doing for email newsletters best practices.
What I’ve discovered is quite amazing. Most companies are simply getting it wrong.
Here are five simple things you can do that will make your email newsletters stand out.
1. Avoid a template. If you add up all the templates offered to you by all the email marketing service companies, you’ll find hundreds of layouts and colors and designs. My advice, stay away! Most are NOT readable. You need to give your newsletter a chance to make it easy to read. If you provide a single column with a small graphical header, that’s all you need.
If you make your email newsletters easy to read, you’ll have happier readers. They won’t tell you your layout is bad, they just won’t read.
2. Give it a soul. This one is simple to do. Make your newsletter come from a person, give the copy some personality, and sign off from a real person. People still want to deal with people.
3. Be consistent. This one is simple also. The biggest mistake I see is the newsletter arrives every once in awhile. At a minimum send a newsletter each month–don’t miss any.
4. Don’t be too long. I was once responsible for sending a newsletter out each month that was over 20 pages long! Guess what subscribers did. They opened the newsletter, read a few paragraphs, saw it was long, and put it in a folder to read later–which they never did.
5. Don’t mix and match. Try not to combine information and promotion in the same email newsletter. When you combine information and promotion in the same place what you really have is information. Separate the promotion into another separate email. (This is one of my most powerful pieces of advice–if you don’t do anything else, do this one)
These days, in email, people don’t pull up a cup of coffee, sit back and read a newsletter to relax. They are dealing with 100 emails a day, getting rid of the ones that don’t help them, scanning the email newsletters, and they are off to the next item–fast, fast, fast.
Make sure your email newsletter fit that reality.