With a well-written newsletter, you would be able to captivate your audience, nurture them and even turn them into potential customers. But, most people fail to create such a newsletter that would be well received by their audience.
Instead, they just create one without any thought put into it or make it sound too promotional and pushy. This can make readers not want to read and just delete it, or even mark your emails as spam, and nobody wants those outcomes.
10 email newsletter best practices to follow
These ten best practices will help you create a fantastic email newsletter that your audience will love and actually want to read.
1. Tell people what they are signing up for
Near the signup form, you can add a small section to tell them what type of content you will be sending them if they sign up for your email newsletter. Be specific and tell them what topics you'll be covering in your newsletters and how often they will get the newsletters.
If people already know what they are getting into when they sign up, they know exactly what to expect from you and will be less likely to get bored of your content or report you as spam.
2. Write newsletters that offers value to the readers
While newsletters can be used to promote, it's not the primary purpose of it. A newsletter is primarily something that is meant to provide value or knowledge to its readers. Value is crucial because why would someone spend time on something that would be of no use to them.
So when you prepare your newsletter make sure to keep at least 90% educational and only 10% promotional. You can offer value with insider knowledge, monthly updates, or even free products.
If you are not sure if your newsletters are helping your audience, then the only way to find out is to ask them. Send your subscribers a feedback form to ask them what they feel about your newsletters and what they want to see in the future.
đź’ˇRelated guide: Learn how you can create a newsletter - step by step
3. Keep your content concise and easy to read
People usually don't feel motivated to read your newsletter when they see a long block of text, and they would likely just skim it or even skip it entirely. And if people are not reading your newsletters, your efforts are wasted.
So separate the content into readable paragraphs to ensure that people can quickly read through your newsletter and get the information from it. To find out if your email newsletter is readable or not, you can ask a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at it and tell you what they see and if they can read through with ease.
4. Use images to enhance your newsletter
As we just discussed, newsletters with just text can be so boring that readers won't read them. So we can use images or GIFs to watch your readers' eyes and entice them to read through. You can add images to simply intrigue readers about the newsletter's topic or make them work with the text and explain the content to your readers.
But, don't go overboard with images or solely rely on them to make the newsletter a good one because if the image fails to load, your content might not make sense to the readers. You can add alt text to make sure that even if the image doesn't load, people can understand what the image was about.
Also, when you add images, make sure their file size is small so that it loads fast when your readers open it.
Delight your subscribers with interactivity in newsletters
5. Make sure the newsletters are consistent with your brand
Newsletters help you connect with people and build brand awareness among them. So you need to make sure all your email newsletters are consistent in terms of content and design. This will make it easy for people to recognize your regular email newsletter and know immediately what to expect from you.
In your content, make sure to only talk about topics related to your field so that customers know that a newsletter from you will be about a specific topic. And in terms of design, add your brand logo to the newsletter and use your brand colors to make your emails unique to your brand. Both of these combined will make sure that the readers know that the newsletter is from you and have an idea about what it could be.
đź’ˇRelated guide: 14 Email Design Best Practices to Ramp up Your Email Game in 2023
6. Optimize your newsletters for mobile devices
Nearly 81% of people check their emails on their smartphones, so you need to ensure that your newsletter looks good when people open it on their mobile devices.
When you create your campaign, make sure to check the preview of emails what it will look like on mobile devices or dark mode and alter the placement of your images, text, CTA according to it. Keep the subject under 35 characters to make sure nothing important gets cut off in mobile view.
7. Segment list based on interest and send appropriate newsletters
If you are a social media expert and someone is interested in your content about YouTube, then make sure to keep them in a list containing people interested in YouTube. By segmenting your audience, you'll ensure you don't end up sending them newsletters about Instagram, which they aren't interested in.
And, to know what your readers are interested in, just ask them directly. Send out surveys asking your subscribers what kind of newsletters they would like to receive.
For instance, if you are a company and would like to start a newsletter for your employees, make sure that you send them content that is relevant to them. You can even check out some company newsletter ideas to engage your employees.
8. Use only one CTA in your newsletter if possible
Your newsletter's primary goal is to provide valuable information and get them to read your emails. So to do this, you need to make sure that you don't add several different CTA buttons that distract them and send them to other places.
Instead, you can add one CTA at the end of your newsletter to get them to interact with your email and take them to a blog or landing page that provides more information about the newsletter's topic like shown in the example below.
đź’ˇRelated guide: How a Strong Call to Action Can Get More Clicks
9. Schedule and send out your newsletters regularly
Use a content calendar to plan your newsletters and send them out regularly to your audience. The regular interval can be anything from daily, weekly, or even monthly, depending on your business needs and reasons.
By planning your newsletters well in advance, you can ensure that your content is well-written, the email renders well, and you are on time to send the emails. This will minimize the stress off your shoulders when you create your content, and you won't have to scramble to put together a decent newsletter.
10. Test your newsletters before you send the final campaign
Now that you have created a newsletter, it's time to find out it's working well and there are no issues with its rendering, deliverability, and accessibility. You can send out a test campaign to a small number of people to check if the newsletter is good and how people are responding to it. Based on the data you get from this test campaign, you can improve the final campaign to get better engagement.
If you use an ESP to create your campaign, you can test your campaign, get detailed metrics showing the effectiveness of your campaign and make changes with the help of the ESP.
And if you want to be more specific, you can try a/b testing, where you test two versions of the newsletters with the same content but the difference in either layout, color, or subject line. This way, you can find out exactly what seems to be working well or not.
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Wrap up
After reading the above email newsletter best practices, you now know what you can do to create good readable newsletters that your audience will love.
However, implementing these newsletter best practices is not a one-time thing; make sure to come back every few months to see if you are still going on the right track or not.
We hope they help you improve your newsletters to nurture and connect with more people.
