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Top 5 Tips on Writing Great Email Newsletters
Anne Holland, Publisher and CEO, MarketingSherpa.com
You've probably heard that there are two things you can do to grow your company the fastest on the Web these days. (And no, neither of them is search engine rankings!)
The first is growing an opt-in email list. The second is sending an email newsletter to it.
Once you've begun to gather lots of wonderful opt-in names from customers, prospects, press and other interested people such as investors, you need to reach out to them. One of the best ways is to write a newsletter that will make them pleased they signed up in the first place.
Here are five top tips on getting your email newsletter opened, read and acted on:
Your subject line:
Do you ever go through your email in-box and delete some messages without even opening and reading them? Most people do. There's just too much email and too little time. That's why it's critical for your email newsletter to have a subject line that makes people want to read more. They are looking for an excuse to delete your newsletter — don't let them!
For example, don't use a subject line reading something like "Our October Newsletter." Instead, use a subject line that engages your reader's attention with an interesting topic or headline from the newsletter, such as "Venture Capitalists Explain How to Get Funded" or "Inside: Exclusive Interview with Shania Twain!" If your audience has diverse interests, you can run a string of subjects, such as
"Shania Twain Exclusive; VC Cash Tips; More Inside!"
If you'd like to encourage pass-along readership, why not use your subject line to do it? The Association for Interactive Marketing (AIM) always adds "Pls. Forward" to the ends of their newsletter subject lines and they tell me it's more than doubled their circulation!
To html or not to html:
HTML newsletters are a moving target. A year ago I would have told you to stick to text-only because too many people had slow connections and old computers. Someday everything may be in HTML — or even rich media with sounds, interactivity and video! But for now it's a toss up.
If your audience is primarily opening your newsletter at the office or during office hours, then I'd advise you to go with HTML. Otherwise stick to text for the time being. Even if you decide to go 100% for HTML, you'll need to create a text-only version. This version should be available for people who prefer text, and for people who's email systems can't accept HTML.
Length and frequency:
General rule of thumb: the more frequent your newsletter is, the shorter it should be. People will happily open a short "Joke of the Day" or their daily horoscope; but almost no one wants to get something longer than that every single day!
So, keep dailies to a page or less and weeklies to 5-7 pages or less. Biweeklies (every two weeks) and monthlies can be much longer — only if you have truly fascinating information to impart. Never go longer just for the sake of length. One monthly I like is Search Engine Watch which tells marketers how to optimise their Websites to get higher rankings at search engines such as Yahoo. This text-only email is so long that the publishers have to break it into two parts to get through many email systems! (For example AOL has a size limit.) But the information is so critical that I'm willing to read it.
By the way, don't even consider doing a quarterly newsletter. That may work in the print world, but online people change their email addresses so frequently and their attention span is so short, that quarterly frequency will only hurt you.
Make it easy on the eyes:
Best copywriting tip: when you are writing a newsletter, set your word processing program so you are writing in the same format that it will appear in on recipient's screens. For text-based newsletters that means 10 point Courier type going 60 characters (five inches) across.
Unless your newsletter is unusually long, or your audience over 45ish, they will probably try to read it on their screens. Your job is to make this as easy as possible for them.
Another tip: always add a table of contents at the top. On-screen readers don't want to work hard to find pieces of information that are valuable to them inside your newsletter. Tell them up-front what will be in it so they can scroll quickly and easily to the section of their choice. In fact usability studies show that most people won't look beyond the first screen of information if there's not something immediately interesting to them. Give them a reason to scroll down!
Tone and attitude:
In my job as Publisher and Managing Editor of
MarketingSherpa.com, I'm constantly interviewing the best Internet marketers in the world. No matter what industry they are in — from fun consumer sites to serious business-to-business portals — they tell me the same thing: make your newsletter's tone personal and casual.
Yes, even hard-nosed businesspeople prefer a personal, even sometimes
jokey, tone in their professional emailed newsletters! This may be because companies and Web sites are sort of impersonal things. People crave a little humanity behind the corporate mask. They respond much better to newsletters that are written by one particular individual at a company who they can get to know over time. They like little personal comments that could only come from a single human being, like "Don't tell my boss but I stole his lunch from the office fridge today!" (That's how one major software firm's successful newsletter opened last week in fact.)
Yes, I understand this kind of writing doesn't always seem appropriate for an important (possibly the most important) communication your company can make to its audience. It is hard to get used to. It can feel risky, even scary at first. But believe me, it will work far better for you than old fashioned "corporate-speak."
Your handy recourses listing:
First of all your best resource is your own email in-box. Take an hour in the next day or so to go around the Web and sign up for more email newsletters. Naturally you'll want to get your top competitors' newsletters, but you also might get a few on your favourite hobby or personal interest. You're looking for samples to steal ideas from. To see what makes you open an email — and what makes you delete without reading. To understand what formats are easiest on your eyes! To realize when tone sounds boring corporate and when personality draws you in.
You'll be surprised at all the ideas you'll end up stealing, often from the most unlikely sources.
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Here are some more great resources on email newsletters:
List-Universe: This free-access Website has 50,000 members who are all email newsletter publishers! You can sign up for their email discussion group, read daily news or research questions. They focus more on the business of publishing a newsletter than the corporate communications or direct marketing business. But I think you'll still find it a very useful site.
Seth Godin's Permission Marketing: You can download most of this New York Times bestseller free at
www.permission.com
- I know companies who'd invested in hard cover copies for every single one of their marketers. And they said it was worth every penny.
Editor's Note: This article is only the opinion of the author. Differing opinions exist on certain recommendations made in the article. These will probably be published in future issues of ‘Directions’.
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