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Monday, January 13 2020

7 Elements To A Great Company e-Newsletter
(Print And Share With Your Marketing Team)

By Glenn Fallavollita, President of Drip Marketing, Inc.

  • Word Count: 467
  • Approximate Time To read: 1.9 minutes @ 250 Words Per Minute

Due to low distribution costs, e-newsletters are an excellent tool for your lead nurturing efforts. Unfortunately, few e-newsletters contain anything worth reading.

If you want more people to read your next e-newsletter, I have listed below a few ideas based on my experience of sending 70 million (yes, million) e-mail campaigns on behalf of our clients.

1. Provide Something Of Value To The Reader: Your e-newsletter must contain information your target audience will like to read. Some ideas are:

  • Alert your audience to problems/solutions, scams and/or safety hazards.
  • Educate readers with important how-to articles.
  • Give the reader a chance to win something from you.
  • Hot industry news, trends, mergers, etc. in your market.

2. Create An Engaging Subject Line: More than anything else, your newsletter’s subject line will determine whether it gets deleted, saved, or forwarded. Some examples:

  • 3 Tips To Help Close 50% More Sales Leads
  • 5 Crazy Things People Are Doing With Our Product
  • Prevent Cyber Attacks: 3 Things YOUR Business Needs To Do TODAY
  • How To Do A $49 Oil Change For Only $19
  • This Employee Lawsuit SHOULD Change The Way You Do Business

If you are having doubts about what to use for a subject line, run an A/B test on your top two subject lines.

3. Get It Professional Designed: If you want to give people a better brand experience, consider having your newsletter professionally designed. Remember, a newsletter design is a one-time cost since you can use it again by “copying it.”

4. Your Frequency: Weekly, bi-weekly or monthly is the ideal frequency for a newsletter (we recommend a bi-weekly frequency).

5. Send Time: I recommend a two-step approach to sending a campaign:

  • Step 1: Send the initial campaign Tuesday @ 8:30 AM.
  • Step 2: On Friday morning, make a list of the e-mail addresses that “did not open” Tuesday’s e-mail. After this list is created, resend Tuesday's e-mail to this list Friday @ 8:30 AM.

IMPORTANT: We have found Mondays are notoriously the worse day to send a mass e-mail campaign; therefore, avoid this day altogether.  

6. Avoid Writing A Wall Of Text: A reader should be able to “scan” your newsletter. That said, use headlines, sub-headlines, bullet points as well as short and snappy sentences. If you need more room to tell a story, give a reader the option to a “Read More” hyperlink. 

7. Use This 6-Step Proofing Process: My company’s six-step review process is:

  1. Write 100% of your content in Word.
  2. Run your content through Word AND/OR Grammarly.
  3. Cut and print the copy into your e-newsletter.
  4. Print the campaign for proofing (have multiple people proof it).
  5. Make the necessary changes from step four.
  6. After step five, wait an hour or two and then reproof it.

Executive Summary: Newsletters ARE a great tool; however, you need to create more than an e-mail newsletter to market your business.

Posted by: Glenn Fallavollita AT 07:58 am   |  Permalink   |  Email