I’ve mentioned time and time again that email marketing is one of your most effective marketing tools when used correctly. However, there are so many companies that do not use their email marketing to its full potential.
It doesn’t mean that your email newsletters need to be a hit and miss. We’ve put together a list of email newsletter best practices that you can follow to make your email newsletter something that your subscribers look forward to.
Have a plan and goal in mind
Before you even think of creating a newsletter you need to establish what your goal of your email newsletter is. From there you can set up a plan on how you want to execute your newsletter.
For some, the goal of their newsletters may be brand awareness or perhaps education. Once you know what you want your newsletter to achieve you can start to plan what content you want to include, where are you directing your readers to and when do you aim at sending your newsletter.
Craft a strong & compelling subject line
Your subject line is one of the first things your readers are going to see and is possibly the most important part of your newsletter. For many people, a powerful subject line is a deciding factor on whether they open an email or just toss it into their trash folder.
Your subject line introduces your readers to your newsletter and needs to entice someone to want to read more. Your subject line should be short and descriptive, generally, the optimal length is 41 characters. The best way to find out what types of subject lines work best with your database is to run A/B tests.
Write email copy that adds value
Your newsletter needs to add value to the reader. No one wants to receive an email and think “what a waste of time”. Email newsletters generally are not promotional emails, and your content should reflect this.
When writing your email copy you want to majority of your newsletter to add value to the reader, this can be done by offering interesting blogs, resources and video content. Newsletters can be used as a promotional platform, but this should definitely not be your main focus.
Focus on your email design
The design and layout of your newsletters are crucial in getting readers to engage. You want your newsletter to be easy to read with clear and concise calls to action. You need to think about things like contrasting colours, the size of your fonts and the different imagery used.
Try and keep your content short and to the point, using headings to easily showcase different content within your campaign. Most people spend on average 13.4 seconds reading an email so you need to layout your content in a way that is easy to scan through.
Optimise for mobile
Mobile accounted for 46% of all email opens in 2018. [99Firms] so it’s crucial to ensure your newsletters are optimised for mobile devices. What do I mean by optimising emails for mobile? In short, you need to ensure that your emails display correctly on both desktop and mobile devices.
You also need to take other factors into account such as the length of your email and the length of your subject line and how this will affect your campaign on mobile. TouchBasePro offers an inbox test that you can use to see what your email will look like on a number of different desktop and mobile devices.
Be aware of your sending time & frequency
There is a fine balance between sending emails too frequently causing unsubscribes and not sending emails too infrequently resulting in disengaged and dormant subscribers.
Sending frequency is something that you will need to test and find the sweet spot for your database. The same goes for sending time. Generally, we suggest sending on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and generally between 9 am – 11 am however, the best day and time to send a campaign is something that you will need to test.
Keep these tips in mind the next time you are busy crafting your email newsletter and if you would like some expert email assistance, get in touch.