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:
- Write 100% of your content in Word.
- Run your content through Word AND/OR Grammarly.
- Cut and print the copy into your e-newsletter.
- Print the campaign for proofing (have multiple people proof it).
- Make the necessary changes from step four.
- 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.
