Email newsletters are a great way to reach your target audience, but they need to be done right if they’re going to be worth your time and effort.
After all, we all get so many newsletters in our email nowadays, but how many of them do we actually read? While email does enjoy a high success rate, it’s only applicable when it’s being used wisely so that readers actually enjoy and absorb the information being provided.
Your newsletter also needs to be professional and a reflection of your organization’s message and brand image. Combining everything into one email can be a challenge, but it’s crucial if you’re going to get a return on your investment for your newsletter.
With this in mind, let’s dive into the subject of creating awesome, high ROI newsletters that not only get opened but actually convert.
Identify the Objectives
Whether you are trying to promote a sale that’s coming up on your eCommerce site, or you have decided to send a personalized offer to one of your clients/customers, the objectives must be clear in your own mind, even before you sit down to create the newsletter. A few pointers to help you with that are as follows:
- There must be a main or central theme e.g. product/service promotion, personalized suggestions, informative content, etc.
- There should also be additional elements in place to support it; an email about the upcoming sale can be supported by highlighting personalized keywords for the customer
Value to the Receiver
It’s important for email newsletters to be informative, and thus of value to the customers/clients/leads that you are sending them to. Therefore, personalized emails work best, because thanks to the availability of big data and AI analytics, figuring out who your target audience is and what they want on an individual level is not that difficult anymore.
Besides, the customer won’t even open the email if they do not believe that there’s any value from doing so. However, in order to catch the attention of the recipient, you must also provide them with a glimpse of what’s inside. Getting the balance right is critical if you’re going to get opens and conversions from your newsletter. This actually leads us to the next point.
See a Few Successful Templates to Understand the Format
Depending on your goals and objectives, the email’s structure will be different, and the good news is, once you have figured out the objectives of the email newsletter in detail, you don’t really have to work too hard and create a template for your emails from the ground up.
That’s because there are templates with high success rates that already exist; you just have to determine your niche for the particular newsletter and customize one of the many established templates until you like what you see. If customer relationship and retention is on your agenda, download these five professional HTML email newsletter templates and personalize them until you are satisfied with the results. You can find more information in this blog post.
Balancing Familiarity with Variety
The human mind is a complicated thing that hates boredom just as much as it loves familiarity! Therefore, the question is, how should you retain a balance between familiarity and variety?
If it strays too far from the types of email that you know the customer has opened previously, it might be ignored, but if they start seeing too many similar emails, then they will simply stop opening them because they won’t see the value in rereading content they’ve already seen.
Of course, we have a few pointers to help you reach the right balance, but keep in mind that a little bit of trial and error is unavoidable here if the business is very new and doesn’t have too much data to work with.
- Determine which templates have had the best ROI so far in previous campaigns
- Determine which template worked for what group of audience
- Choose which of the templates were the most effective in previous campaigns, and were being used to create emails similar to the current newsletter’s objectives and niche
- Make sure that the chosen email was sent a significant while ago
- Refrain from emailing too frequently, as it not only makes your newsletters boring, but they will also lose value to the customer
- Make sure content is relevant by including trending topics and insight to draw in readers.
- Never change the core branding elements of a successful template; just modify the content
Notice and Utilize the Difference Between Open Rates and Clickthrough Rates
Check to see which of the emails have had the most open rates and then check which ones have the highest clickthrough rates. The two lists based on these two most important KPIs are not likely to be identical, and here’s how that data can be interpreted for creating highly effective email newsletters now.
- Good open rates indicate a good header and a good subject line
- Good click through rates indicate a good design and excellent content
Both types of content can be used as canon for their respective purposes, but they should be first modified to match the objectives of the current newsletter.
Every inbox allows the user a small preview of what’s inside an email by letting them know who the email is from, what the subject line is, and what the preheader says about the content. An intelligent combination of personalized keywords and clever language can do wonders for your open rate. Throw in your brand logo, and a sense of authenticity is immediately established in the recipient’s mind, further boosting the email’s chances of being opened.
Overall, creating a quality newsletter allows you to reach out to your target market and show them the benefits of working with your company. Use this article to help you create the perfect newsletter that enhances your organization and provides readers with the information and support they need.
