Tips for a Fantastic E-Newsletter

An e-newsletter is a powerful marketing tool to accompany your online efforts because people usually opt in themselves to receive the newsletter. Your newsletter can bring traffic back to your site, remind your market that you are still around and doing cool stuff, or update your readers on your company news. But the kicker is that your newsletter does all this for a group of people who you know are already interested in your product/service/company! For this reason, you’re starting out ahead when you decide to send out an e-newsletter. Follow these tips to make sure you stay ahead.

Sign-Up
Give visitors to you website a reason to sign-up for your newsletter, and tell them upfront what that reason is. Will they get a 15% discount, free shipping, a fabulous free e-book? Spell it out. Also, make sign-up as easy as possible. The quicker, the better. Don’t direct users to a long, painful form asking for a ton of personal information. What do you need to send an e-newsletter? A name and an email address.

(Image from Steve Krug’s book, “Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems“)

Content
First of all, put some effort into creating a thoughtful, interesting subject line to increase the chances of people actually opening your email. Think, “Hot Summer Deals!” vs. “May 2010 Update.” Your content, of course, depends on your goals, but the usual rules apply. You’ll need content that is relevant to your readers and timely. The point of an newsletter, is to be, well, news-worthy. Give them a resource that shares information they are not likely to find out about elsewhere. Finally, remember the 60/40 rule as a guideline. That is, keep shameless self-promotion below 40% of the entire newsletter content.

Design
The design should be clean, usable and aesthetic. Nielsen Norman Group found that users only spend 51 seconds reading a newsletter, on average, so make your newsletter can be scanned easily and that it effectively calls attention to what you intended. It wouldn’t hurt to test your newsletter out on a few friends. Have them talk aloud about what they notice and like/dislike about the newsletter as they read it for the first time.

Purpose
As with any endeavor, create a plan before you jump into creating your newsletter. Write out your goals. What do you want people to do after they read your newsletter? Do you want them to visit your website? Incorporate a call to action in your newsletter, if that is your purpose. Finally, consider using an email management system such as Constant Contact, which allows you to analyze clicks, open rates, etc. You can measure your success over time and see what needs improvement.

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