Email newsletters or email marketing is still one of the most common used way in Internet Marketing for business. Without a doubt, it’s still the easiest way to get your message to your intended audience, such as delivering your promotional message to your customers.
While most businesses are doing it daily as an operational task, many missed out the opportunity and values that they can get out from these daily email newsletters.
Let us share the 5 effective ways to get more out of your email newsletters.
Newsletter Design
The design of your newsletter makes the first impression of your message. So, make sure your newsletter design stands out and able to attract the attention to “continue reading”.
Make sure to match your newsletter design with your brand, product and website. You don’t want to make a design that stray too far away from your business theme as this introduces a lack of consistency and unity.
You can use the same header and footer of your website in your newsletter design as well, this will make the reader have a sense of familiarity when reading your newsletter.
Content
If your email subject is attractive enough, the next thing that comes to the reader’s eyes is the content. Averagely, most people spend merely 15 seconds on a single email.
As you only have more or less 15 seconds to deliver your key messages, make sure to arrange your content in point forms rather than a whole chunk of paragraph. People tend to read point forms more than paragraph as they are usually short, snappy and straight to the point.
Do not include more than 200 words in an email newsletter (unless you are really desperate), you can always include a “Read More” or “More Info” button for those who are interested to read on, as this will also help to drive traffic to your website too.
Images
Some businesses prefer to send newsletter in a complete image format. Meaning that the whole newsletter contains only 1 image which carry all the messages they want to deliver. If you are doing the same, you can apply some tweaking to enhance your newsletter.
If you use only 1 big size image, this will slow down the message loading time and if it fails to load within 3 seconds, there’s high chance people will close your email even without seeing anything yet.
Try to include a short text message at the top of the line, so people can expect what they will see after the image has loaded. Ensure you use ALT tags for all your images as well.
If your image is really large, consider breaking it up to a few smaller pieces so some of the top images can be loaded first before the lower ones, in this way your reader won’t face a big empty gap in their email content.
Testing
You finished designing the content and then you just click the Send button? No! Hold your horses until you are confident that what you see now will be the same as what your reader is going to see later.
If you are using a good email newsletter system, you should be able to use the function of email testing at multiple different email platforms, so you can take a look at how your message will display at Gmail, Outlook and several other email clients.
However if you are not using any email newsletter system, you may want to do the testing manually by sending the email to yourself in different email platforms.
Once you have confirm your message is displaying properly, no broken images, alignments are all neat and no miscoded HTML, you are good to go.
Actions and Subscriptions
In every newsletter, you should include a call to action message or button to prompt an action from the reader. Whether it’s a purchase action, read more or contact action, it should display clearly and positioned at near the bottom of your message.
This call to action button is your main objective of the newsletter, so make it clear and precise.
On top of that, never forget to include a link to unsubscribe for your future newsletter. This may be sad, but you don’t want to end up getting sue under the violation of CAN-SPAM ACT of 2003, don’t you?
You can always include a simple survey form and ask why your reader unsubscribe so you can remedy the mistakes you’ve been making and enhance your future newsletter.
We always recommend using a right tool like a good email marketing system to create, test, track and send newsletters as this will greatly help you to improve on newsletter sending.
Sanz Teoh
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