Getting people to subscribe to your newsletter is only half the battle. The real war begins in the battle to keep them from hitting the dreaded unsubscribe button. Moreover, you don’t want to find your newsletter – or your brand – to become a nuisance in someone’s inbox.
Here’s how to avoid both:
Make their subscription valuable
Did you wake up one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I already have all this great content on my social media pages and website, I should totally start a newsletter! It would be easy since it’s all already done!” If so, you need to go back to sleep and think again. An email newsletter is not a place where you simply hit Ctrl C and Ctrl P and call it a day.
Your newsletter content should be fresh and original to your newsletter. Obviously, much of what you discuss on different platforms will be about the same topics, but you have to adjust your message to each platform. What works on Facebook won’t work in a newsletter. Yes, certainly include links to that fabulous stuff on your other sites, but it has to be gravy on top of an already killer newsletter.
SWEETEN THE POT: Offer newsletter-exclusive deals, such as a special discount or unique offering only available to those who subscribe to your newsletter. Anticipation of these types of bonuses will keep them opening your emails and even have them forwarding it to their friends.
Respect people’s time
When it comes to email marketing, less is more. Research tells us you have less than 8 seconds for the recipient to decide whether to keep reading or back out. If they open your email and it seems to drone on forever, you’ve lost them. Even if it looks interesting and they say they’ll come back and read it later, they won’t. Also, you’ve just put the opening of your next email at risk.
EASY TO DIGEST: Keep your points short, sweet and to the point. Keep your copy blocks concise, coming in around a hundred words or so. If you’re going to include an article in your newsletter, keep it close to 700 words. If you find these limits aren’t manageable, remember there’s another newsletter coming up next week and you can easily create a series of articles that come over several weeks.
Let’s get personal
If your newsletter could easily be mistaken as something written by a robot, you’re likely losing subscribers by the pound. Readers will quickly see through you if your newsletter is solely a marketing piece aimed at selling them something. The person writing the email has to have some sort of personality, so use it!
People don’t want to talk to a business; they want to talk to other people. So, approach your newsletter as a human. That means including a conversational greeting and closing to your emails, and write as if you’re talking to one single person.
A final word
Putting the above tips into practice will help make your newsletter something worth receiving. But if I may, before you jump into putting these tips into action, consider a couple of questions: What do I want to achieve with my newsletter and what do people want from my newsletter?
Sometimes, you have to know where you’re going before you can get there.
Thanks for reading,
