Regular connection with your audience is necessary for building a long-lasting relationship.
If you are running a business and someone reaches out to you, you have to reply soon. If you reply after days, weeks, or months, they would definitely move on to another brand.
This is where you can rely on Newsletters for maintaining contact with the audience. When someone has provided their email and subscribed to your brand, they expect some updates, news, or messages from your end. If you keep them hanging with no emails, then your email marketing efforts are wasted.
So, it is pretty important to grab their attention and keep them engaged with the brand. This is where you should think about starting a Newsletter as soon as possible.
What is a Newsletter?
Newsletters are directly mailed to your prospects that are present in the email list. It is a way of engaging with the audience, just like you use blogs on your website. When a subscriber has shown their personal interest in providing their emails to join your email list, you have to make it personal and customized based on the user.
Newsletters have to begin with that particular subscriber’s name for giving it a personal touch. You can either keep it simple by adding text or even making it interesting by adding photos, links, GIFs, audio, and even videos. This is how you keep the audience engaged with your brand by mailing them once in a week or so.
Now, you might be thinking about why it is essential to run a newsletter campaign.
Let’s find out the answer to this question.
What is the importance of Email Newsletters?
If you use the email list wisely, then you can relate to the saying that the riches lie in the list. Several studies show email marketing ROI is attractive.
If you sell a product, you can market it pretty well with the help of your Newsletter Campaign. When people are providing their emails to you, it means that they trust you. Now, if you are selling them something directly through your email, you can definitely see a huge difference in your sales.
On the other hand, you can also see impeccable results when it comes to blog traffic. By simply adding a link to your blog and social media handles, you can drive traffic to different places through the Email Newsletter.
These reasons would have made it pretty clear how beneficial a newsletter could be for you and your business.
You would have also seen that people open emails very little. So, how can you create newsletters that are really opened and read by the audience?
That’s the challenge.
Let’s break down the process of creating a newsletter that gets opened and read.
How to come up with a Newsletter that interests readers?
Not everyone will read your newsletter, but you can ensure a higher open rate with a solid strategy. Follow the below tips to create an effective one.
#1. Begin with an Intriguing Subject Line
What would be the first thing that would interest you to read any particular book or even a blog post? I guess it would be the headline. As per CopyBlogger, it has been noted that only 20% of people will read the entire blog post, while 80% of them will only read the headline.
The headline of your newsletter has to be eye-catching and interesting to raise your audience’s curiosity levels. That’s how you can make them open the email and read the entire newsletter.
If you look at emails, you will see a limitation of characters that the subscribers can see before the text gets truncated. So, we can say that you only have a few words to prove your newsletter worthy and interesting for the audience.
Other than that, you will also have to avoid certain phrases and words that could trigger that spam filter of subscribers. If, by any chance, your newsletter is ending up in their spam folder, then you can’t expect it to be read by any chance. So, you must go through the words to avoid ending up in the spam folder.
#2. Write a creative Email Copy
An email has to be pretty interesting and creative. You need to focus on keeping it simple and easily understandable for the audience. The actions you want the reader to take should be pretty clear in the newsletter.
You need to get an excellent copywriter for rolling out newsletters that really convert. Keep the newsletters about the audience because they want to know how you can help or benefit them. You must always keep your audience’s perspective in mind while writing a newsletter copy.
Once you are done with the copy, you should reread it and ask yourself whether it’s really going to help the reader or not. Place yourself on the customer’s side and think about the use of that particular newsletter.
The best way to connect your audience with the newsletter and your brand is to use storytelling. Develop an emotional connection and make it relatable with the reader, and you will see them opening your email every time.
Leverage AI to help you with your content.
#3. Mobile-friendly Newsletter
Those days are gone when people used to turn on their PC or laptops for checking mails. Now, people prefer opening emails directly on their smartphones. So, you need to customize your newsletter so that people can easily read them on their mobile phones. It should be readable as well as functional on mobiles and tablets.
These are the top three tips that will help you come up with Newsletters that are opened and read by people.
Now, let us jump to some cool newsletter ideas that you can utilize.
How-to Articles
Nothing could be better other than a step-by-step guide. Your audience demands content that is relevant and helpful for them. If you are running any particular business, you can provide a how-to article with step-by-step instructions for performing a specific task.
All you need to do is think about what type of content you wish to deliver to your audience in the email list. You can either shorten the steps and share them directly through mail or even share the link to your blog post where you have written the detailed article. How-to articles work pretty well for newsletters, and they are handy to drive traffic.
Share YouTube Videos
If you have a YouTube channel for your personal brand or business, this option is for you. People love to watch informative videos, and when you are providing them directly to their email, that’s the best thing for them.
Videos are really engaging for the audience, and they will definitely bring in more views. As the video will not directly play in the email window, you should add a cover image of the YouTube video. Below the image, provide a button to open the video on YouTube. This will intrigue the users to open the YouTube video.
Share your Blog Posts
There’s no better publicity than getting a bunch of views on your latest blog post. Whenever you are posting a new blog, you can directly email the subscribed users to help them view it easily. This will drive more traffic to your blog. Email promotion for your blog posts will give in amazing results.
Another advantage is that you can add some sharing options directly in the Newsletter to allow the viewers to share your blog post directly to their social media handles.
Listicles
People find it pretty easy to read listicles. This is why people create more listicle posts, as they are also easy to skim through. You can create a list of some valuable articles, tips that you wish to share for any particular thing, or anything that might intrigue your audience.
Sending a newsletter with a list of items makes it easily readable and understandable for the reader. Below the listicle, you can plug in the link to the original article or even allow them to share it on social media handles.
Share Tools
There are plenty of tools available out there for every purpose. All you need to do is find one tool that is the best among all the others for a particular purpose and bring it in front of your audience. People often find it difficult to find the right tool for their purpose, and when you are sharing the right tool every week, they will wait eagerly for the newsletter.
If you are running a blog, you can directly link the tools to your blogs to drive traffic to your website. In this way, you are keeping the email subscribers happy with some useful resources every week.
Share Infographic
Instead of only sending in text-heavy newsletters, you can definitely try out sending visual ones. An infographic is a perfect way to capture the viewer’s attention towards your newsletter. What you can do is send in the statistics, year-end sales numbers, or prepare some cool charts related to something and send in the infographic.
When you explain all the steps or any information with the help of an infographic, it creates a better impact on the audience. This is why it’s a great strategy to design a visual and share it in newsletters.
Arrange a Poll or Survey
If you are running a business and want some feedback for your product or service, you should prefer sending a poll or survey through the newsletter. Surveys tend to receive lower engagement, but it’s also considered the most effective way to collect valuable information. On the other hand, polls can be really interactive for the audience. You can use polls for collecting some basic information and feedbacks.
For getting your surveys filled, you need to send a solo email that completely focuses on the survey part. You can put up a link in the newsletter to redirect the viewer to a new page for filling the survey.
Send some Free Resources and Gifts
If you have created some eBook or Guide, you can definitely utilize it to share with the audience. Your newsletter can promote it pretty well. Your readers would find valuable content directly accessible on their emails. All you need to do is make sure that the resource you provide is actually helpful to the audience.
The content you add in the eBook has to be properly researched with appropriate data. That’s when you can really engage the reader with your free resource. Other than free eBooks, you can even give away some random subscriptions or gift hampers to enhance the value of your brand in the market.
Blog Post Roundups
Besides sharing the most recent blog posts, you can also create a roundup of your blog posts. This roundup will consist of some of the best articles on your blog. You can even categorize the blogs and create a best-of-the-best roundup of blogs to share them directly through the newsletter.
This will drive more traffic to your site, and your old posts will also get visibility. This is considered the best way to introduce all your new subscribers to some of your best content from old times.
Referral Program
Creating a refer-a-friend newsletter is the best way to gain more subscribers to your email. You can ask your loyal subscribers to refer your brand to their friends and family members.
When the subscribers forward your newsletter to someone, and they sign up for your newsletter, you can reward the original subscriber with some gift, free resources, or even a special discount on some product or service. This is considered the best way to increase your email subscribers and bring your brand in front of more people.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Sometimes, you might be getting some questions plenty of times. This is the chance to send out a newsletter with all the FAQs so that the readers can easily get their answers. It is easy to find FAQs because all you need to do is go through your email box, chat logs, or even talk with the support team to get the list of FAQs ready.
When you put in answers to all the FAQs and send out the newsletter, it will save a lot of your time. You won’t have to answer these questions frequently anymore.
Expert Interviews
People believe more when they hear some famous personality recommending something or speaking well about something. Expert interviews are the best way to make your brand famous and trustworthy in the audience’s eyes. When you share the expert interviews with your email subscribers, they will have a look at it, which will develop a sense of credibility for your brand.
This is another reason why people hire influencers to sell their products on social media. Expert interviews are not only promotional, but they also add a lot of value to their content.
Event Invitations
If you are arranging any event, even if it is a webinar or pre-recorded session, you should first invite all your subscribed people to the newsletter. They are the ones who have specially signed up for your newsletter so that they get to hear about everything directly from you. They deserve to know about every event at first.
When you are promoting any event to them through a newsletter, that’s when you are really promoting the event. It is considered to be the best way to bring an audience to your event.
Special Discounts and Offers
People who have provided their emails and subscribed to your newsletter should be given some special discounts on your products and services. This is the best way to make them feel special. You can also use the strategy of rewarding the subscribers who forward the mail to their friends and family and bring in more sales for you.
When you keep the subject line as “exclusive promotion only for subscribers”, the chances of your mail being opened increase to a huge extent, this is another way how you can grab the attention of your subscribers.
Latest Updates
If you are running a business newsletter, you can portray your product or service in the best way. Even if there is a small change or update made to the product, you can send a newsletter with the changes to make your subscribers aware. As they have subscribed to your newsletter, they should get to know about the updates first.
You can either share some images or videos to demonstrate the updates that have been made. This will advertise your product and also bring more traffic to your company website and YouTube channel.
Portray User-Generated Content
It is not necessary that you always have to come up with new content from your end. The best thing you can do here is sharing the content uploaded by the users of your business on their social media. Their experiences could be the best thing that people would like to read.
Your newsletter could consist of some user-generated content where your brand name is mentioned. Other than that, you can even send some quality content produced by your users through the newsletter.
Ask Me Anything
This is an excellent idea to get your audience to interact with your newsletter. Whether you are running a business or running a newsletter for your personal brand, you will find plenty of people replying to this newsletter with some meaningful questions. This interaction will help you to gain visibility, and it would also work as a good marketing strategy for you.
Instead of free consultation calls, you can do a newsletter thing where you answer the questions of every subscriber of yours. The results would be amazing as this strategy will make your newsletter very popular.
Leading Industry News
People use different platforms for reading news. When you deliver them their relevant industry news through the newsletter, they would never stop reading it. In fact, they would wait for your newsletter because you are providing some valuable knowledge that they don’t have to hunt for on the internet.
Motivational Stories
Anyone would like to have some motivational push in their day. When you deliver an interesting story with motivation to kick off their week, they will never miss out on reading a single newsletter. Monday Motivation Newsletters are considered an excellent option to gain visibility and share value with your subscribers.
Resources Roundup
With every passing week, you can develop a list of resources for different purposes to send over to the audience. This idea is similar to that of Blog Post Roundup. Over there, you were sending only the best blog posts. Here, you have to build a solid list of resources that might turn out to be useful for your subscribers.
Whenever a list is involved with some pretty cool resources mentioned, people will like to give it a read.
Tip of the Week
Sending daily tips sounds very spammy. Instead, you can send a tip of the week. You can keep it something related to the niche of your newsletter or even send some generic tip that you find useful. This is an excellent way to build connections with your email subscribers and make them feel that you care about them.
Conclusion
If you are thinking about starting a newsletter, this is the ideal time to make it happen. This list of solid ideas will make it pretty easy to launch an effective and interesting newsletter. The most significant thing for a newsletter is to stay consistent.
With the right implementation of strategies, you can build a successful newsletter campaign for driving traffic to your website and even leads for your brand.
If you haven’t decided yet what to use to send a newsletter, you can try BigMailer.
