Want to make sure you are ready to send your email newsletter that people actually want to read and respond to? Follow our 8-step checklist below to create the best newsletters you possibly can.
1. Promotional banner in an email signature
The ending is no less important than the subject line. Of course, you can always use something like “Sincerely,” “Best regards,” or “Stay tuned,” but if your goal is getting more website visits and building closer relationships with subscribers, you need to stand out.
For example, if you add a well-thought-out email signature in your newsletters, you will likely increase customer engagement. A typical email signature contains all the essential contact data and a personal touch in the form of a sender’s photo. This reinforces brand identity and evokes trust.
On top of your personal and contact details, you can also take advantage of an email signature banner, where you can promote whatever you want: from a recent blog post to a new sale.
Modern email signature software also provides you with the opportunity to add call-to-action buttons, your company logo, and social buttons.
But there is more to it than that. Draw a signature for a more personalized sign-off.
Tip: With the help of an email signature, you can also increase the number of subscribers in your list. Just install email signatures for all your employees and, thus, increase the number of recipients seeing your invitation to subscribe.
2. Useful content
In your email newsletter, provide only relevant and timely information. It’s always a bad idea to send something to your subscribers just because you have to.
Even if you sell footwear, we are sure you have a lot of things to share and teach your customers. One day, you can add some interesting information about the latest shoe styles. Another day, it can be all about the ways to care about footwear or how to pair certain models with certain outfits. Useful content and relevant information will minimize unsubscribes.
3. Catchy subject line
Getting noticed is hard in today’s content-heavy world. The fact that someone signs up to receive your newsletter can’t guarantee that they will open and read every email from you. That’s why you need to be attentive to subject lines. These are the first thing subscribers see once they check their inbox.
You can choose to keep the subject line the same for every email newsletter to help recipients recognize their favorite brand. But they may get bored quickly and stop interacting with your emails.
Be creative, yet don’t overdo it. If it’s not clear from the subject line what the email is all about, people can simply ignore it.
Keep the subject short, include numbers, create a sense of urgency & fear of missing out, highlight the relevance, be specific.
4. Relevant visuals
Sharing facts and statistics can be challenging. You write long lines of text, and subscribers get bored. That’s why sometimes it is better to present your content with the help of informative visuals. These can indeed make a significant difference to how well people understand your data and what they remember in the end.
5. Sending time
There is no specific time that works well for everyone to send emails on, but you can assume that Mondays and Fridays are not the best days to expect high open and response rates. On Mondays, your subscribers are likely busy at meetings or preparing for the week ahead. On Fridays, people are either in a hurry because of deadlines or already looking forward to having a fabulous weekend with friends and family.
That makes Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays the best days of the week to get in touch with your subscribers. It is also better to send newsletters in the morning when people’s minds are still fresh.
But once again, there is no perfect time for everyone. Test!
6. Links to your website
Many newsletters are often overloaded with information. Now think about how many people enjoy seeing longreads in emails? What if they consume content using a phone? That would be too much trouble. You spend hours writing the text, and they don’t read it. That’s why it is a good idea to write a brief description of the content in your newsletter and then provide a link to read further on your website.
In this situation, you can take advantage of your email signature with calls-to-action leading to your website or recent blog posts.
7. Option to unsubscribe
There are few benefits in keeping your subscribers database full of people who aren’t interested in your content. And it shouldn’t be a surprise to you that modern anti-spam laws oblige businesses to add the unsubscribe button to emails.
So make it clear how subscribers can stop receiving your emails.
Tip: Before you send the newsletter to your entire database, make sure that it is arriving safely in inboxes, not ending up in a spam folder.
Fortunately, the most popular email marketing applications let you send test emails — just don’t be lazy to use this functionality and send a test newsletter to a few different types of email account types such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.
8. Contacts segmentation
Not every contact in your email list who signs up for your updates is looking for the same information.
That’s why you need to segment your audience into different groups. This segmentation can be based on recipients’ interests, age, location, open rate, inactivity, stage in sales funnel, device, past online behavior (you can offer cheaper and more expensive packages to different segments).
Contact segmentation will likely increase overall engagement on your email campaigns and reduce the number of unsubscribes. It will also help you build firmer relationships with your supporters.
Conclusion: follow the best email newsletter practices
Every time you create a new newsletter, you should ensure that you are:
- obeying the law by messaging only those who gave consent and providing subscribers with an option to unsubscribe;
- not over-communicating with your people by sending irrelevant information just for the sake of doing your routine tasks.
So now that you know how to start a newsletter and what things to pay attention to, you should be ready to start sending newsletters. Good luck!
