Email is still one of the most powerful marketing tools – and it costs you less than any other type of digital marketing campaign. That being the case, it is surprising that the art of crafting a newsletter is not as actively pursued as other types of marketing skills. This is the conclusion which comes naturally when so many business owners report low opening and CTR rates on their email newsletters.
This doesn’t mean that email doesn’t work anymore – it only means that you should invest more time and care in developing your newsletters. The small mistakes you are not even aware that you’re making are quietly killing off your opening rates. People note any small discrepancies between what they signed up for and what they are actually receiving in their inbox.
As things stand, we believe that it is useful to share a few actionable pieces of advice for all our blog readers. These will hopefully be the missing link you needed to achieve a high conversion rate on your email newsletters.
- Make Sure You Use a Familiar “From” Field
You should have an email address titled as your website or blog reserved for sending newsletters. After all, people subscribed to Fresh From Oven not to Office, or Info, or (the worst) Marketing.
The greater the familiarity of your email name, the greater the chance of getting your email opened. Otherwise, it gets directed straight to the Bin folder (or even Spam, in some cases). On a secondary note, it is useful to have an email address reserved to newsletters only. If your readers send questions and replies, you should be able to find them quickly and answer in a timely manner.
- Make Your Newsletter Design Responsive
Many older generation newsletter templates are not responsive. The format, the text, the images and the CTA buttons do not fit nicely on any size and shape of screen, so that people who read their emails on the smartphone will have a hard time reading yours. And guess what happens after one or two instances? Yes, you will get an Unsubscribe notification.
- Use Dynamic Content to Personalise Emails
If you segment your customers’ base for ad campaigns, why wouldn’t you do the same thing to your newsletters? What is the reason to send the same content to different groups of people, with different interests? Worst of all, why should you refuse personalisation, when it is so easy to achieve?
There are many dynamic content tools to choose from. With the help of this feature, each customer will receive messages tailored to the type of content they usually browse on your website. This will certainly boost up your opening rates and make the customers more confident in your business, because they have the proof that you know them and cater to their needs.
- Go Bold with Graphics
The age of text-only emails is long gone. People want some eye candy before they decide to actually read your email, so they will give it a quick look over. If what they see does not impress visually, they will go back and delete your email.
When designing your newsletter, pay the same attention to visuals as you do when you work on an ad campaign or post on Instagram. Great photos create attention, and great text content increases it and also offers logical and emotional reasons for people to keep reading and then click on the CTA button.
- Have a Coherent Structure and Go with It
Email newsletters should be a part of your brand – this is why you have to refine your template until it is virtually synonymous to your business image. A great newsletter template is, first and foremost, simple: header, body, and call to action.
Pay attention to typography in your headline and coordinate it with the body of text and with your CTA button. When looking at the newsletter it must have a unitary look – nothing out of place, nothing too much.
Last but not least, do not forget to A/B test your newsletter design and continue to work on it based on the analytics results you get over time.