Despite all the available avenues marketers have for selling, newsletters are still the best channel for speaking directly to your customers. The benefits of email campaigns are clear. You don’t have to worry about platform limitations or appeasing algorithms to stay visible enough to reach your potential clients as you do on social media. Email marketing is the most profitable portal for selling that you can use to reach out to customers for free. The hard part is getting people to open and read them at all.
Let’s face it, we are all ignoring tens if not hundreds of emails per day. Our inboxes are stuffed and our attention spans are limited. People don’t have the time to read every email they receive and even if they did, many are not worth reading. The question we seek to answer now is how to encourage engagement despite these obvious challenges?
Choose better headlines
Think of your newsletter headline as a snapshot of the content inside. It is the thing people see first and you have about 2 seconds to make an impression. You could fill the headline with emojis and exclamations points to grab their attention but this looks spammy and may lead to your emails being send to the folder of no return. A better idea is to consider your readers, who they are and their interests, create your newsletter with the intention of speaking directly to them, and the headline becomes easier to craft.
Add value
If you are sending multiple emails only to share product information that is easily found on your website or repackaged versions of your ads, people won’t engage. They might even get annoyed receiving them and choose not to open future emails. They know most newsletters are meant specifically for selling and yet you still have to add something more to make readers stay long enough to engage with them. Once you have a great, unique headline you need to back it up with excellent content that adds something new to your readers’ understanding of themselves, your products, or our shared reality. The best newsletter content does all three.
Keep the design simple and copy concise
Avoid getting your newsletter tossed into spam and your business being filed away into your customers’ mental junk drawer. Keep your newsletter content short and concise. It doesn’t need to as long as a blog post. If what you’re writing becomes too long for your newsletter, only share the first few paragraphs (make sure they’re amazing) and the full piece on your website’s blog. If it’s too long, readers lose focus. If they are interested and click on your blog, great. This is one way your newsletter can generate traffic to your site. The layout and design should also be simple. Too much going on makes it harder to stick around for the content. No matter how interesting the copy is, no one wants to stare at a wall of text and sort through unnecessary images to see it.
Conclusion
While there are challenges with email marketing, it is still one of the most effective channels for communicating with your customers and generating the most leads. Investing in your newsletter is an important element of maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers. Remember who your audience is and write to them. The more you center their interests in your newsletters, the more they’ll engage. More engagement is key is more getting more leads through your email campaigns.