Last Updated on September 6, 2024
According to the 2013-2017 Email Statistics Report released by Radicati Group, in 2013 approximately 182.9 Million mails were expected to be sent per day, among which 100.5 millions are supposed to be business emails. The reason behind this huge popularity is, “Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%.” But even if that might sounds incredible to some, this statistic isn’t really working that great for many marketers.
And the reason is simple; they are not doing it right.
Many marketers tend to make some common email marketing mistakes which restrain them from achieving desired result. Especially when it comes to creating good content for winning newsletters, marketers are often clueless about what to do and what not to. Here are some simple yet extremely effective tips to create content for your newsletters which will surely help you earn better ROI.
1) Nail Your Email Subject Line
Email subject is the very first thing your readers get to see. It convinces your readers to open an email. “35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.”
The subject line controls the destiny of your newsletter to a great extent. It works as a deciding factor whether your email will get opened or trashed. Keep a few do’s and don’ts in mind when creating your email subject lines:
- Try to keep it short and simple, remember “Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%.”
- Create targeted email subject lines by making it localized and personalized
- Let your readers know ‘what’s in it’ for them, talk about the values and benefits they’ll get
- Ask questions, provide tips and solutions, and create urgency through the subject line
- Don’t write your subject line in all capital letters
- Don’t use certain words like: Free, make money, cash, sex, win, etc. These words generally trigger spam filters
2) Kill It with Quality Content
Content is king. The best way to keep your readers interested in your newsletters is, to provide them with high quality, relevant, and useful content on a regular basis. Offer exclusive and informative content on the chosen topic. This will help your readers increase their industry knowledge. Not only that, keep the format impressive and make sure the copy is error free:
- Always copy edit and proof read your email content to make it free from any sort of spelling or grammatical errors
- Insert interesting and relevant image to support the text
- Don’t overdo it with links
3) Pick a Great Topic
If you want a longer ‘list life’ for your subscribers, choose your newsletter topics carefully. Gather information about your readers and put together the topics of their interest. To hold the interest of your readers for a long time, you can:
- Choose evergreen topics like the ones which will never be obsolete, for example, ‘Blogging tips for beginners’
- Ask them questions, solve their problems and answer their queries.
- Provide DIY content which they can apply in their lives
- Provide tips, ideas etc. in the form of a numbered list
- Listen to social media conversations and create content around those most discussed topics
- Curate best content on particular topics and create a list of them to share with your audience
4) Don’t Sell Just Tell Them
No one likes being pressured to buying something. An email is surely not the right place to hard sell. If people have already subscribed to your newsletter, they obviously already know about you and are interested in your offerings. They don’t need to be “convinced” to buy something or treated like people who are watching an infomercial.
Try to treat your customers as your friends. You wouldn’t hard sell your friend your products, would you? If you do, they will probably not be your friend anymore. Instead you should tell your friend (customer) what you’re working on and what’s going on with your life (business).
Give them relevant information which will help them solve particular problems. This will help you be on top of their mind and whenever they plan to buy something (which you happen to offer), your name will be the first thing that comes to their mind.
5) Make It More Scannable
According stats, “Mobile now makes up the majority of email opens at 51%” while “31% of emails globally are opened on a desktop.” Considering this fact, whenever you create your email newsletters try to make them as scannable as possible. Mobile devices generally have a small screen size, if your email is loaded with long paragraphed content, it will be difficult for your audience to go through your entire email and digest it. Here are some tips to help you out:
- Divide the newsletter in small paragraphs and short sentences
- If it’s a long one use prominent headings for different sections (take a look at this article)
- Use bullet points to state the value propositions
- Highlight vital information
- Use white space
At the end of the day, your newsletter should look good and your audience should find it easy to consume. To sum it up, always A/B test each variable and all content combinations to come up with the best possible option which will earn you the maximum ROI.
Best of luck!