Create an Email Newsletter to Delight Customers
Email newsletters allow you to send multiple messages to an already qualified and curious audience. An email newsletter is a great forum for listing your most interesting content, announcements and promotions. They are also useful for gaining traffic and boosting customer loyalty by keeping audiences in the know. When businesses take the time to nourish customer relationships, they will ultimately see an increase in sales.
With an inbound marketing methodology, your business should constantly seek new ways of delighting your customers. Your email newsletter, when done correctly, will serve to inspire, educate and entertain your customers; without overloading them with unfocused information or promotions.
Whether you’re starting a newsletter or want to revitalise an old one, read on for 13 email newsletter tips you can implement in your next one.
1. Product Updates
Inform your customers about any changes to your product or service, and how that change will affect them personally. Instead of just focusing on text to describe your product include new use cases or case studies, a product video how-to, an exclusive tip of the month, a new best practice, or new vendors of your product.
2. Balance Your Content
Don’t let your newsletters only be about self-promotion. You’ll want to generate a healthy mix of promotional and educational content to remain useful to customers and to ensure that they don’t stop opening your emails. Your newsletter should be 90% educational and 10% promotional. You’ll also want to keep your newsletter focused on a specific topic, to keep audiences engaged with a particular vertical of your brand, not every aspect of your business.
3. Include Stats & Data
Include relevant statistics and data points in your newsletters to encourage your customers and demonstrate industry understanding; proving your position within that success. Infographics are gaining pull as one of the most popular types of online content, so delight customers by sharing infographics that are personalised just for them.
4. Personalise Subject Lines
Personalising your subject lines is a must for email open-rate success. Consumers open emails with personalised subject lines at a 50% higher rate compared to emails without personalised subject lines, yet only 2% of emails employ personalisation. Make sure you’re in that 2% and delight your customers by focusing on customer experience.
5. Focus Your CTA
Your newsletter should contain a prominent CTA, urging your customers to complete a specific action (i.e. clicking through to a blog post), as opposed to several CTAs that overwhelm your subscribers and defeat the purpose of the CTA itself. The less important the call to action, the less space it needs to take up on your newsletter.
6. Reward Loyal Subscribers
A great way to get people to subscribe to your newsletter is if they are granted ‘exclusive’ perks in return. For example, giving your loyal subscribers exclusive discounts, deals, or even tips that your non-subscribers don’t get can increase customer engagement and loyalty while boosting sales.
7. Include Images With Alt Text
Your emails will most likely contain images. Those images, however, may not be enabled for your subscribers. For this reason, having alt text where your image should appear can still inform your subscribers of what the image contains. This is important if your CTA is an image because alt text can replace the call to action with alternative words, ensuring people will still click without the image telling them to.
8. Minimalise Design & Copy
Because a newsletter already contains a lot of information, it can easily feel cluttered and disorganised. That’s why keeping your email newsletter format, design and copy to a minimum is key; you want to feed your subscribers digestible information that doesn’t give everything away. Your subscribers should use your newsletter to click-through to other bigger pieces of content, not to read the entire blog post in the email. To alleviate any visual clutter, maximise the white space in your email.
9. Offer Further Reading
Giving your customers a break from your company and supplying them with insight on, or recommendations about, other delightful brands or products can improve your credibility and your open rate. You can also extend this to online content you found useful, ebooks, webinars, or any additional materials that have benefitted you and would benefit your buyer persona.
10. Include Positive Feedback
Share the positive feedback you receive from your customers directly on your newsletter so that people don’t need to go searching for it. Positive feedback ensures customers and prospects that your products are reliable and worth purchasing, and that they serve to create a delightful experience.
11. Include Free Resources
Include links to your free downloadable content, courses, white pages, dossier, etc. in your newsletter to boost click-through rates and to nurture your leads further. Offering your audience helpful information in visually pleasing formats will only inspire them to keep opening, reading and clicking on your newsletter.
12. Mention Upcoming Events
Remind your customers about upcoming events, both online and offline, to increase customer engagement and brand visibility. Usually, people don’t remember exactly what date and time your webinar, workshop, Q&A, etc. will take place, so make sure you highlight it in your newsletter.
13. Make Unsubscribing Easy
To keep your emails out of people’s spam, make sure they can unsubscribe with ease. Although it seems counter-productive, giving people a clear option to unsubscribe will help filter your leads and contacts; leaving you with an active, engaged subscriber list. Those who do unsubscribe can be assigned a negative lead scoring value to remind marketing to follow-up with that lead and re-target them.
