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How to Create a Great Email Newsletter

Almost everyone has an email newsletter today. The truth is most people on these newsletters don’t read them. An interesting email newsletter helps propel the growth of the list.

Here are seven tips to create newsletters people actually want to read. This will supercharge your email marketing efforts.

Use plenty of whitespace

Want to drive attention to your call to action? Space them out with the help of white space. White space helps do away with cluttering on the newsletter making it easy to choose and click the link. Keep whitespace around things you want to drive attention to.

White space improves UX and functionality helping the reader find the link they should be clicking on.

The template doesn’t need to be fancy.

On mobile this makes the newsletter easier to navigate. A Litmus survey shows that 46% of people opened emails on mobile. The numbers keep rising. Don’t lose those readers by spoiling their reading experience.

Keep the email short

A short newsletter with white space above the fold is easy to scroll as well as skim.

Keep an eye out on the number of calls to action in the email to see how far people scroll. You can check this on the analytics tab in any email automation tool.

If your subscribers are not clicking on the calls to action every through 50% of the email you can reduce the length of the email newsletter by half.

It’s obvious they are not reading through any of that content. You’d be better off with none of the content.

The next step is to trim down your content further so the newsletter only has valuable information.

A large file size could always get clipped by email clients. Gmail does this on emails longer than 102kb. And so do other email clients.

To avoid the problem- test emails and see if there are any clipping issues for web versions of the newsletters.

There’s generally an option to view the email as a webpage in settings or under advanced settings.

Make the newsletter informational

Ideally, your newsletters should be helpful with the majority of the content geared towards educating your audience.

To achieve this you can use smart personalization and dynamic content.

Smart Content: Smart content changes based on the subscriber and the stage of the buyer’s journey. If they download a lead magnet you send them a different newsletter. For instance if you have someone on your list who’s a potential client, you can include tags to add a video proposal to the email.
Personalization: Starting from the contact’s name, the company he works for and other tags are important in personalization.

Your customers don’t always want promotional content from you.

They don’t want to get newsletters 3 times a day informing them of sales and asking them to buy. Whatever service you want to promote, say whitelabel link building, or content marketing service keep the mention of it to a minimum.

Perhaps if you educate them with latest trends, styling options and other choices they will be more inclined to buy from you. In return, you make more money. Always try and get feedback from users when creating and managing such projects. Instead of sending them coupons or discounts all the time, think of content that’s going to positively benefit them.

Tell them what you’re going to send beforehand

Once you know what’s the newsletter’s focus and content, make sure you’re going to communicate about the same on your subscriber landing page as well.

Tell them exactly what the newsletter will contain and when and how they will hear from you.

As a subscriber give them options to control the frequency of newsletters and a brief idea on the overarching content of the newsletters. As marketers this information will reduce odds of spam and unsubscription rates too.

Use creative email subject lines

Even if somebody signs up to get newsletters from you there’s no saying the person is going to open your mails. Most marketers try to increase familiarity by following a theme on their subject lines.

However, following a set pattern gets old. Keeping a tried and used line gives people no incentive to open the emails. On the flipside a creative, highly engaging subject line is different.

You open them because of the subject lines and the interesting topics capture attention. It’s the same for readers.

Go with one call to action

What makes a newsletter a newsletter is that you’re using multiple calls to action. This doesn’t mean that all CTAs are created equal.

An email newsletter could have a number of calls to action, say one that gets people to click and read through blog posts or forward the newsletter to a friend. So informational content like a wellness product review such as that of BetterHelp sits on one side and the call to actions are displayed promptly at the center. The calls to action to the reviews must be something people can click if they they don’t want to click the main CTA. It’s just an option.

The main highlight that stands out front and center should bte headline call to action. Say the 10% promo code you’re offering and so on.

In this email example what you can see is the call to action that’s colorful and immediately results in a click.

Use videos

Text in any form is hard to consume. There’s the whole business of reading through it.

So what’s the solution? Record videos and use them on your email newsletters. Recording what you want to say and sending them inside newsletters is a proven way to get more opens and more actions.

Visual content in the form of videos and images is important for the rest of the email.

But email can be a bit tricky. Because people sometimes choose to disable images. Make sure these images have the most essential part intact: their alt texts. This is the same thing I advice for reviews such as this Nordpass review.

Alt text is alternative text that appears when images are not loaded in an email. This is important if you have CTAs that are images, you make sure that people understand there was an image there.