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Message Consent

How to Create an Email Newsletter Readers Want to Read

By: Corinne Sinesi

Email marketing is a great way to connect with customers and clients. Ninety-one percent of B2B marketers rate email as the leading channel for overall content marketing success, followed by LinkedIn and print.1 In a world ruled by social media, email marketing still tops the charts.

You might be looking to build upon your company’s email marketing efforts by starting a newsletter or updating an existing one. Marketers send email newsletters consistently—whether it be daily, annually, or somewhere in between—to serve as a round-up of blogs, company news, and other essential resources. This tactic keeps customers in the loop and builds critical brand awareness, serving both ends of a business relationship. However, it’s not enough to just start a newsletter.

Here are email newsletter best practices for ensuring every prospect is nurtured through creative and strategic newsletter output.

What to Include in a Newsletter Email

Interested parties typically subscribe to email newsletters, already knowing you and your offerings, so this is not where constant promotion benefits the bottom line. The average email subscriber receives around fifteen commercial emails a day.2 If they already get your campaign emails, your newsletter could end up being just another promotional email that falls to the wayside. HubSpot suggests a content balance that is ninety percent educational and ten percent promotional.3 Focus on serving up timely, meaningful content and showing off exciting company milestones.

One issue that companies face in compiling an effective newsletter is finding a focus. You don’t have to support every facet of your business in one concise, round-up email. Instead, lean into one vertical or theme for each send. If the product promotion and press release you’re sharing belong to the same family, then your email newsletter format will have more order and less randomness. Before sending your new and improved newsletter, conduct research around audience preferences. Not only do you want your prospect to open the email, but you want them to act on it. Here are questions to ask yourself when compiling the right resources for your email newsletter every time:

  • Which blogs are performing the best this month? Which resources get the most downloads?
  • Has anything “big” happened to the company? (Product launches or acquisitions, for example.)
  • What is happening in the industry that we should let customers know?
  • What vertical brings in the most revenue?

How to Write a Newsletter Email

Writing an effective newsletter comes down to keeping your audience’s attention. Here are email newsletter tips for composing catchy subject lines, maintaining a digestible email length, and incorporating the right calls to action.

Engaging Subject Lines

Just because people subscribe to your email newsletter, it is not always guaranteed that they will open it. Many marketers keep newsletter subject lines the same to boost recognition, but this can quickly become stale for onlookers. It is more valuable to create compelling subject lines that encourage action and foster curiosity.

Appropriate Email Length

Once you nail down a focus or theme for each newsletter, it is important to keep the email short and simple. Not every newsletter has to move the needle, and most people don’t have the time to read a lengthy email, so concisely relay necessary information in both copy and design.

Strategic Calls-to-Action

Another newsletter aspect that needs to be considered is where you send users who open the email. Since they tend to have several different CTAs for various content or landing pages, it is beneficial to have one primary CTA at the top that leads to where you really want your audience to end up, which could be a contact page, request-a-demo page, or even your homepage.

Deliver Effective Email Newsletters Every Time

Inboxes are saturated enough, so it is important to make your email marketing efforts count every single time. This includes your newsletter. If you are still trying to figure out where to leverage marketing strategies or how to write and design a compelling newsletter, Sagefrog is here to help. Get in touch with us to see what we can do to bring your email marketing to the next level.

Sources

1“B2B Content Marketing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America.” Content Marketing Institute (2017)

2“Average Email Subscriber Gets 416 Commercial Messages Per Month.” Marketing Charts (July 2017)

3Mineo, Ginny. “How to Create an Email Newsletter People Actually Read.” HubSpot Blog.