Five Things to Remember (and Five things to forget) in e-newsletters

Potential clients can sign up, showing interest in your business when they may not be quite ready to purchase, and repeat customers are reminded you’re there. Social media is great for conversations with your audience and raising brand awareness, but a good e-newsletter really engages with people and keeps them coming back - and won’t get lost in the Facebook or Twitter feed! In this blog we give you our five things to remember in your e-newsletters, and five things to most definitely forget!

Remember these 5 things!

1. Make it personal

The person receiving your e-newsletter has chosen to hear from you, so listen to them! What do they want? What would be interesting or useful to them? And don’t forget to include something personal from your business, like having the e-newsletter come from a specific team member, rather than a faceless logo. And a picture never hurts!

2. Reward your reader

Include exclusive content to keep people engaging with your brand. Special offers are a great way to measure the reach of an e-newsletter, and remember to mention discounts and unique content in your subject, preview text and pre-header to get that all important ‘open’! A good e-newsletter template will make it easy to complete these.

3. Links are essential (and make sure they work!)

So many businesses promote without thinking about the next step. You have your reader’s attention, so how can they buy, find out more or get in touch with you? If you are mentioning a product, sharing a picture, talking about an event, link to it! And always send a test email to yourself - even if you have standard links in your e-newsletters that stay the same each time, it’s a good way to check for faults or website issues. Don’t lose that new client because the link didn’t work!

4. Check your success

A week or so after sending your e-newsletter, check the report from your marketing provider. This is one of the many ways a professional campaign can give you the edge over a basic email - you can see what worked and what didn’t. How many recipients actually opened your email? Which topic got the most click throughs? This will help you give your audience what they want, and ultimately increase your open rate and traffic to your site. 

5. Data Protection basics

It’s not the fun part of promotion, but it is essential. With more people becoming aware of how their data should be treated, it’s more important than ever to make sure you are compliant. A professional marketing provider will have all this built in, keeping email addresses secure and allowing people to safely and quickly unsubscribe when they want to. Having these options clearly available shows that you take security seriously, and makes people more likely to trust your brand. 

Forget these 5 things!

1 Rambles

Long blocks of text are a turn off. Unless you’re writing something official, keep your text short. One or two paragraphs at the most, with pictures, is all you need on a topic. If you need to get something lengthy across, share the first paragraph and then link to your business blog instead. 

2 Repeating yourself

An e-newsletter isn’t just a place to repeat a months' worth of Facebook posts. If your customers already follow you on social media, they’ve hopefully seen what you’ve shared already. If people see the same thing online and in their inbox, they will become bored and stop engaging. 

3 Flashing images

Don’t fill up someone’s inbox with complicated gifs or large images that slow everything down. Emails can’t be scrolled past like tweets. Digital marketing tools will automatically resize images, or highlight where changes need to be made to optimise your email, so you won’t be guilty of inbox clogging, or worse, your email being marked as spam! 

4 Being late

If you promise subscribers a ‘monthly e-newsletter’ send a monthly e-newsletter! Companies that have a sign-up on their website but never send anything appear unprofessional - like having a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated for two years! A good marketing provider makes creating regular content simple, and by showing customers that you stay current and responsive, you build trust and retain clients.

5 Corporate image

You want to be professional but you don’t need to be formal! Audiences engage more with real people than dry, corporate speak. If there is something vital you need to tell your readers then make it clear - a coloured section or different font is useful when highlighting important information. Otherwise keep a light, conversational tone.

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