Email marketing continues to generate the highest ROI compared to other digital marketing channels, making it a must have in any successful digital strategy. When putting together your email marketing plan, you have to decide what types of emails to send to your audience.
In an effort to not send too many emails, you want to be strategic in choosing which messages will be most useful and effective in your email marketing strategy. While transactional emails are popular and effective, they are not the only type of emails you should send. Email newsletters are a great nurturing tool that convert, with 59% of customers saying that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.
When choosing to use newsletters as part of your email strategy, there are some rules you need to follow to get the best results. In this article, we go over the best practices for email newsletters to boost engagement and enhance your brand.
Why Email Newsletters Are So Valuable
Digital marketers agree: email newsletters are effective, and the overwhelmingly preferred method by consumers to receive company information. This is why 77% of B2B companies use an email marketing newsletter in their content strategy today.
Email newsletters can enhance your business by:
- Increasing revenue through sales
- Building trust and authority with your audience
- Increasing website traffic
- Keeping your audience engaged
- Building social media following
Best Practices For Email Newsletters
- Offer value
- Keep the message short and simple
- Offer exclusive discount codes for newsletter subscribers
- Keep a consistent schedule
- Use eye-catching email newsletter design
- Include links to social media
- Stay CAN-SPAM compliant
- Test and track your email newsletter performance
- Be mobile friendly
Offer value
Every piece of content you create should offer value to your subscribers. Whether it’s educating about new products or notifying of a company policy change, make sure your email content focuses on the customer’s needs and is useful. How-to tutorials, webinars, and case studies are all great examples of content that can offer value while also building brand awareness.
Keep the message short and simple
Time is precious. Even though your subscribers want to receive your messages, they still want you to get to the point as fast as possible. Make sure every communication you send to your audience is specific, thoughtful, and helpful. Your emails should only be as long as they need to be.
Below are some ways to help keep your message concise:
- Eliminate small talk and get to the point
- Edit or combine repetitive sentences into one thought
- Have a clear call to action (CTA) for optimization
- Format with bullet points and short sentences for easy readability
Offer exclusive discount codes for newsletter subscribers
Reward users who choose to opt-in to your email campaigns by offering exclusive discount codes in your newsletter. This will keep your email list engaged, encourage them to open your emails, and keep your unsubscribe rates lower.
Keep a consistent schedule
Set expectations of how often your email subscribers will hear from you by having a consistent email schedule. If you choose to send a weekly newsletter content or a monthly newsletter, make sure you stick to that schedule as closely as possible. Being consistent with your email delivery will improve metrics such as open rates and click-through rates, because your subscribers will be expecting and anticipating the emails.
Use An Eye-catching Email Newsletter Design
Make your emails enjoyable for your subscribers by creating a visually appealing and easy to read email newsletter design. Consider readability of fonts, use of white space and imagery when choosing an email newsletter template.
Include links to social media
Promoting your social media platforms in your newsletter exposes your email clients to your other channels of communication. Aside from growing your social media following, promoting your social media accounts will increase brand awareness to both old and new subscribers.
Stay CAN-SPAM compliant
Protect your reputation and avoid risk of being non-compliant by making sure your email service provider follows CAN-SPAM guidelines. This allows subscribers to opt-out if they no longer wish to receive your emails. Besides avoiding complaints and potential fines, email compliance drives improved efficiency, productivity, and deliverability rates.
Some examples of CAN-SPAM guidelines include:
- No false or misleading header information
- No deceptive subject lines
- Inclusion of an opt-out mechanism
Test and track your email newsletter performance
Any marketing strategy should be tracked to determine its success. A/B testing is important to try out different messaging to see which resonates best with your target audience.
Be mobile friendly
Just like any other correspondence, your email newsletter design must be mobile friendly. Emails that are not mobile friendly are deleted in less than 3 seconds 70% of the time. With over 80% of emails now being read on apps, such as gmail and outlook on mobile devices, you don’t want to take the time to create valuable content only to have it deleted because of poor formatting.
Using Email Newsletters To Boost Engagement
Email newsletters build trust, promote loyalty, and increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue. When putting together your newsletters, be sure to have a clear message, call to action, and schedule them on a consistent basis on your email marketing calendar for best results.
