Who isn’t familiar with the “Monday morning sweep,” when you find your inbox littered with auto-generated promotions, announcements, and roundups you don’t open? Select. Unsubscribe. Delete. Delete. Delete. The Monday morning sweep.
Newsletters are a great way for organizations to reach and build audiences via email. But when they contribute to the junk obscuring inboxes, they become a problem. Forty-four percent of people cite excessive emailing frequency as the primary reason they unsubscribe from an email list, according to a new ZeroBounce report.
The last thing you want is for your organization’s newsletter to get swept out with the inbox clutter. Luckily, with the right plan, a newsletter can be a great tool for connection and something subscribers actually look forward to reading, not to mention a fun creative endeavor for your organization. Here are some of the keys to a successful newsletter.
Identify your purpose
Who do you want to connect with and how do you want to help them? Newsletters are a great way for organizations to use owned content to directly connect with their audiences. But newsletters shouldn’t be just another place to sell to people. Aim to inform, entertain, or spark conversation with an efficient, behind-the-scenes, no-fluff rundown of your latest company news or sector insights. It should make subscribers feel more connected to your organization.
Build your audience
Assemble your list of contacts who have opted in to receive communications from your organization. When they sign up for your list, greet them with an engaging welcome email that lets them know the kind of information they can expect from you. Utilize other communication channels, like social media, to invite new subscribers. Encourage sharing and tease upcoming stories to let potential subscribers know why they can’t miss out on the information in your newsletter.
Fill it with the things your audience actually wants to see
Gather input from all departments of your organization. What are the most frequently asked questions your customer service team is receiving right now? What is confusing potential customers that your sales team is speaking to? Who has an outstanding customer story or community event to highlight? Draw inspiration from many different voices in your organization and package it in a brief and skimmable way.
Give it a human touch
Choose consideration over automation: No auto-blasts of website content without real human oversight and curation. While this may seem like a huge undertaking, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. You can update and/or reuse content you have already created for social media, your website, press releases, podcasts, and other communications efforts. Track stories between editions, keep a running list of newsletter-worthy items, and use a template for your standard layout.
Make it visually interesting
Including visual elements is also key. Vero research shows that campaigns with images have a 42% higher click-through rate than campaigns without images. Photos that tell a story or show real humans are usually the best choice. Make sure photos, videos, and images support the written content, are optimized for fast loading, and include descriptive alt text for accessibility and SEO. If you don’t have a steady flow or library of your own images, you can always pull copyright-free photography and illustrations from websites like Pixabay or Pexels, or invest in an affordable stock image license. Make sure to include appropriate attributions.
Choose a cadence that supports engagement
With newsletter outreach, sometimes less is more. When determining cadence (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) take a good, hard look at the amount of new content you have. Let the flow of new information determine your outreach. Also, don’t be afraid to skip an edition here and there if you are light on content. Make sure you’re only landing in inboxes when you truly have something to say.
Always test before you hit send
Test every newsletter email prior to distribution to double-check that the content is correct, links are working, and the design looks the way you want it to. All marketing platforms have an easy mechanism for testing before sending. The newsletter test email also helps facilitate easy internal collaboration on edits to copy and images from your teammates, and any organizational messaging approval processes. It is also a great way to see how the newsletter renders on desktop and mobile.
Track your stats and learn from them
One of the great things about newsletters is that they generate quantitative data you can use to track your progress and help you better understand your audience. This data can help you refine your newsletter strategy continuously, surfacing information such as the best day of the week and time of day to distribute your newsletter, or what types of keywords in the subject line best capture attention. These will be different for every newsletter and every audience. You will also have access to statistics like email open rates and link click-through rates on various elements in your newsletter. Mailchimp found that the average open rate across industries was 35.63%, and the average click-through rate was 2.62%.
A truly great newsletter does one thing above all else — it provides value to its audience. With just a little time and consideration, you can keep your audience engaged in a meaningful way and avoid relegation to the spam folder.
Our monthly newsletter, Skimworthy, puts all of this into practice. We hand-curate tips from our comms pros and recent client stories — no auto-blasts, plenty of pics, real human curation. Subscribe here and see what a well-built newsletter actually looks like.