5 Tips for Creating an Email Newsletter Your Customers Can’t Wait to Open

Before you create your first email newsletter, stop for a moment and consider one essential truth: you might have the greatest customer list in the world, but your emails aren’t worth much if nobody reads them.

How do you create compelling newsletter content for your business? Follow these 5 tips:

Ask yourself why you want to do an email newsletter.

Are you trying to increase traffic to your website? Increase foot traffic in your stores? Encourage customers to bring in a coupon? Hoping customers will call your office?

You can’t design a newsletter that will achieve your marketing goals if you don’t have clear marketing goals in the first place.

Create compelling, useful content.

Put yourself in the customer’s inbox. You’re getting dozens, maybe hundreds of emails per day. Your goal is to delete or ignore as many emails as possible so you can get on with your day. What kind of email would you not ignore?

Obviously, your email content will be wholly customized to your business, but here are a few guiding concepts:

• Be authentic.
• Be funny (if it works for your brand).
• Above all, be valuable. Value can come from useful information or, more conventionally, discounts or coupons.

The inherently finite attention span of the average American consumer, coupled with the voluminous electronic communications content said consumer receives on a daily basis, generate a cacophonous information environment in which loquacious or obtuse messaging efforts have limited opportunity for market penetration.

In other words, be brief.

Get on a schedule.

You wouldn’t stop advertising on the radio after running just one spot, and you shouldn’t stop your newsletter after just one effort. You’re creating a series. This is a long-term campaign.

If you’ve crafted compelling content, sending your emails out on a schedule is a way to get your customers hooked. You want your customers to be in the habit of expecting and opening your emails, and that means you need to get into the habit of sending them on a schedule.

It might be “5 pm on the first Tuesday of every month” or “every Wednesday at 7 am.” Just please, don’t make it “5 times a day.” Remember, put yourself in the customers’ inbox. Nobody likes spam.

Always let your data be your guide.

General rules are helpful, but the best way to hone your email newsletter for your specific business is to follow the data. Your email marketing service should provide you with open rates and unsubscribe data. You might also check with your website analytics team to understand whether visits to your website or landing page are coming from your email newsletter.

Armed with this information, you’ll have a better idea of what subject lines, send times, and newsletter content work best for you.