How to Beat the “Delete”
5 Tips to a Better Email Newsletter
Email newsletters can be a good way to maintain and even build a relationship with your customers and supporters. However, you run the risk of alienating them unless you are careful to create a product that is in step with their preferences and habits.
It wasn’t long ago that Detroit ruled the American Road, mass producing heavy trucks and SUVs. When fuel prices skyrocketed, however, many drivers abandoned American brands in favor of foreign models offering better fuel economy.
It was a classic failure of vision – of not giving the customer what they desired or needed in a product. In a similar way, you have to be sensitive to your customers’ desires and expectations when communicating with them via email newsletters.
You may already have an email newsletter to which they have willingly subscribed. And, if so, it’s reasonable to assume they trust your brand, buy your products or believe in your cause.
But is your email newsletter effective, or are you testing their patience and tempting them to look elsewhere because of a failure to recognize what your customer wants in this kind of communication?
A study by useit.com confirmed that people typically have strong emotional reactions to email newsletters. Useit.com’s Jakob Nielsen writes: “The positive emotional aspect of newsletters is that they can create much more of a bond between user and company than a website can.
The following tips can help you shape your email newsletter so that it has the best chance to strengthen, rather than diminish, relationships with your customers.
1. Appreciate Your Audience – Think about who will be receiving your email newsletter. How did you acquire their email addresses? Are they regular customers? What do they buy? What causes do they support? Answering questions like these will help you identify the kind of content you should provide to them.
2. Content Is King – For many companies, figuring out what to put in their newsletters is the hardest part of publishing one. A good piece of advice is to THINK LIKE A READER/CUSTOMER and make sure every item, as much as possible, is RELEVANT to an end user’s interests. “How-to” articles and those rich with active links to reliable information sources can be especially appealing. In short, what would YOU like to see in a newsletter if the roles were reversed?
3. Brevity Is Best – Nobody wants a rambling newsletter popping up in their inbox. And forget about wordy articles extolling products and lengthy success stories. Say what you’ve got to say in no more than 150 words per item. The truth is most people only scan newsletter articles to get the gist of the content. If you’re lucky, a telling headline will pull a reader in even further. According to the useit.com study, only 23% read a newsletter thoroughly. A strong SUBJECT LINE is vital to getting the email opened and it’s not a bad idea to borrow a line directly from the newsletter content provided it is striking.
4.Timing Is of the Essence – Nothing prompts end-user/customer scorn (and thus more clicks on the “delete” button) than bombing inboxes with overly frequent communications, even in the form of content rich newsletters. Plan a regular communication schedule that delivers current and USEFUL information so that readers will be looking forward to it rather than dreading its arrival.
5. Effective Formatting and Design – Your email newsletter format will have a big impact on readership. To make this decision, you must first identify your audience and determine what is most likely to appeal to them. The most common formats for email newsletters are HTML, Plain Text and PDF, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Generally speaking, HTML will allow you a more or less professional look with pictures and graphics while Plain Text is a “just the facts ma’am” format that frees you from HTML coding but has less style, graphics and perhaps less impact. A PDF format can use a lot of graphics and design elements not available to HTML or Plain Text but has the drawback of requiring users to either download it or have software (Adobe Reader) that can open the document. Some people won’t bother to look at your newsletter because of this inconvenience.
Critically, you should make it very quick and easy for people to either subscribe or unsubscribe to your newsletter. If the process is slow or frustrating, you will almost certainly annoy people and risk losing their business as well.
Remember, a well done email newsletter benefits your customers by providing relevant information while not imposing too much on their time. It can be a tricky balance to strike, but if you are successful, customer loyalty should thrive.
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Written by Scott Wigton