How to create effective email newsletters

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

Email newsletters are the bread and butter of email marketing. Almost any site with a central theme and regular content updates deserves a newsletter of some sort. A newsletter is an excellent tool to engage your target audience in an ongoing digital conversation, keep top-of-mind awareness, and drive a continual flow of web traffic.

Of course the first tip I’ll give you for creating a successful newsletter is to promote it everywhere. Place a registration field on every page of your website. Ask customers in your physical store if they’d like to receive the newsletter when they’re making a purchase. Place a link to it on your receipts, flyers, anywhere appropriate that will enable you to grow your subscriber list.

As your list grows, it may become less effective to send out one mass newsletter, as a wider audience will have more defined areas of interest. In which case, it would be appropriate to segment your list and personalize the newsletter content. The MSDN newsletter is an excellent example of this. Content is automatically inserted based on the subscribers’ programming interests and their location. Of course, this requires far greater content ownership, but the tradeoff is a more relevant message, and therefore a more engaged audience.

Your newsletter should not simply contain the latest updates to your website content, because your visitors could easily monitor your website and/or RSS feeds for that. To ensure that your subscribers continue to perceive value in your newsletter, you should include tips and tutorials that will enable them to perform their job or hobby more effectively. Newsletter-exclusive stories and coupons will also increase the likelihood that people will continue to want to receive your newsletter.

Newsletters tend to have very high open rates, but lower click-through-rates in comparison to other email types. This does not mean, though, that they can’t be profitable. Including a small/discreet amount of advertising or promotional content is quite acceptable, and will receive a fair amount of exposure. For example, each newsletter could contain a ‘featured product’, perhaps an affiliate product with a discount for your subscribers. Also, any links to your website within the newsletter will provide further opportunity for advertising.

If you’re setting up a newsletter, you may be wondering how you should format it. For example: should you include all content within the newsletter, or rather short ‘blurbs’, with links to read the articles in their entirety? Well, this entirely depends on your audience, you’ll have to test each format and see which provides the best results.

When designing your layout, you’ll want to make sure that a subscriber can easily scan through the newsletter to pick and choose what they want to read. If it’s difficult to scan, people won’t bother to take the time to scour it closely.

One other quick tip I can give you is to keep your newsletter interactive. As regularly as possible, include short polls, surveys and quizzes. Provide the results in the following newsletter. This will keep people expectant – giving them something to look forward to for each coming newsletter.

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guid