Email newsletter subscribers will thank you for following these 12 guidelines
An email newsletter is meant to inform the subscriber that receives it. Many non-publishers have an editorial email schedule that is much less frequent than ours. That’s why in general, we like to give at least one take-away in every email newsletter that we send, in order to keep people opening every day.
Review your email newsletter, along with these 12 guidelines to see if your email newsletter can do a better job at organizing content and getting subscribers to complete your calls to action.
Design for easy readability
Your email newsletter should use images when it supports the content and business goals, but try not to overuse them. The best read email newsletters have a lot of white space and divide the text and images up evenly to avoid distraction.
Take a look at your email newsletter and decide whether yours follows these guidelines:
- The email newsletter has a design that’s engaging to the eye and draws the reader in.
- The email newsletter has a design that’s consistent with the sender’s website/landing pages.
- The email newsletter uses images responsibly and judiciously, to add to the reader’s experience, not detract from it.
- The email newsletter is easy to skim, with short paragraphs, bullet points and white space.
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Create valuable content that is interactive
Like I noted earlier, the content needs to provide some kind of benefit to the subscriber. If they continue to open your email newsletter and find themselves deleting it immediately over and over again – they will unsubscribe.
Make sure your email newsletter follows these content guidelines:
- The email newsletter provides benefit-oriented content that is written in an engaging manner.
- The email newsletter includes engagement tools for readers, things like surveys, polls, links to discussion boards and ways to provide feedback to, or communication with, the editors.
- The email newsletter follows the 60/40 rule, with at least 60% of the content being editorial and no more than 40% being promotional.
- The email newsletter is a manageable length to read online—2 to 3 printed pages.
Know your business goals
Sending an email newsletter with no call-to-action is a waste of your list, so you should always give the user at least one thing to do. Review your calls to action and see if they are clearly able to get the user to complete a task:
- The email newsletter has a clear, recognizable business goal.
- The email newsletter content supports this business goal 100%.
- The email newsletter includes multiple calls to action.
- The email newsletter calls to action are effective but not “pushy.”
At the end of the day, we want our subscribers happy with the content that we create, and we also hope that all the free content we give away will encourage them to buy from us in the future. Great content and clear calls to action should ensure that everyone is happy.
