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02 May 2017 / by Marine / in Community Management, Content marketing
How to Make Your Newsletter Stand Out
Today, newsletters are an essential tool used by all kind of companies to create a relationship with their prospects and customers. If you don’t have one, now is the time to make one! If you do it well, it can only be beneficial to your company’s promotional activities. Here are 6 tips for drafting the perfect newsletter:
1. Don’t try to sell
The point of newsletter is not to sell, but to inform and build a relationship with your audience. People are already inundated with dozens of useless emails each week and if your recipients see that you’re simply making a brash attempt to flog your wares, they will likely lose interest and consider your message to be yet more cloying spam. If you want to inform people about your upcoming products or special offers, it is better to send them a promo-specific message, not a newsletter.
2. Don’t forget to talk about yourself
So your newsletter’s role isn’t to sell, but to inform. This isn’t to say that you won’t talk about your products and include relevant informative material. After all, you’re sharing your latest news, and this might be the most salient topic of conversation. In terms of distribution, it is highly important to find a kind of routine that your readers will get used to. And visuals are key! You can create an eye-catching design that channels your brand identity and replicates the style you’ll use for each edition.
It is also important to include some key elements, such as your up-to-date logo, the email address of your company and your phone number, which people can use to get in touch. In addition, you’ll need to find a good title and an attractive subject line so that recipients will be more enticed to open the newsletter upon receiving it.
3. Select the content you want to talk about
So your office just got a new coffee machine?… so what! This isn’t the type of information that will interest your newsletter recipients, so don’t include it! So much content in your average newsletter is superfluous, and you need to be mindful that you can lose a time-strapped reader’s interest at any moment. So before getting to work on the drafting of the written content, brainstorm and analyse what your audience will want to know about you and will best respond to. This is the very first step on the path to newsletter glory! Your content needs to remain simple. So no need to use complicated vocabulary or bewilder people with complex sentences. People don’t have the time and will not make the effort to decipher your message, so less is more in some cases.
Try to avoid writing exactly the same thing that has been written on your blog recently. You need to give your audience fresh content and new info relating to current developments in the company.
4. Remain concise
It’s a newsletter, not your diary! People usually spend less than 1 minute on it. You should set up your content in such a way that it is as easy to read as possible. Be as clear as a Swedish politician’s criminal record when it comes to choosing the titles and subtitles, as your reader has to immediately understand what each section talks about. And beyond not simply overloading your newsletter with superfluous content, you should avoid excessive attempts to have your reader click on the links redirecting to your website. Pushy clickbait is easy to recognise and will not be appreciated. You need to be clear and strategic with regard to this. Some kind of call-to-action is essential and may simply take the form of a “Learn More” button.
5. Decide on the frequency
You need find out which frequency is best suited to your content and your audience. Once a month? Once every three weeks? Once every quarter? It’s up to you to decided which makes most sense. Needless to say, it’s a bad idea to submerge your audience with an excessive number of issues, as they’ll come to resent it. If you regularly have really interesting information that you’d like to share, and you want to avoid your newsletter being too long, it may be an idea to send it more often. This will prevent overloading just one issue.
6. Find your identity
Depending on the brand image you want to convey, you need to adopt a fitting and appropriate tone. Logically, the newsletter of a young startup will not adopt the serious and corporate tone of a big multinational company. You need to ask yourself what your brand’s personality looks like and the industry your business is operating in. The style and tone adopted by your newsletter will naturally reflect this. It’s vital to respect your brand image for the sake of coherence.
Only when you understand which information is most essential to your reader and you reflect upon the best way to structure it that you will create a good newsletter. Even if this process can seem a little bit complicated at the beginning, after some time you will fully understand how to create an effective newsletter and it will become second nature.
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