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Email Marketing Newsletters

You probably get plenty of emails from other companies, how many of them do you read? It's important not just to send marketing emails, but to send the right marketing emails!

Email Newsletters
Noun

A type of regularly sent email that keeps your customers up to date with the latest news, tips, or information about your product or company.

What Are Email Newsletters?

Good idea, let’s start with the basics. An email newsletter is an email (duh!) that communicates directly to a specifically targeted audience. For a business, reaching out to a customer base, this can come in many different forms. Latest news, product updates, how-to guides, insider information; anything you think your customers might find useful.

There’s no hard and fast rules about how often you should send your newsletter, but most companies will either fire out content once a week, or stick to a strict quarterly publishing schedule—while others will only release information if there’s some important product update or organizational change that the customer might need to know about.

How Do I Send An Email Newsletter?

Email newsletters are a super, cost-effective method of communicating your brand message. To help you in your endeavors, there are a number of handy tools and applications out there, all with the express intention of making the whole email newsletter process as straightforward as possible.

Let’s take a look at some of them:

Mailchimp

MailChimp is perhaps the most well-known name in the world of email newsletters; there isn’t a popular US-based podcast that’s not sponsored by them!

Their ubiquity in the industry is no accident, either. It’s a great product. Customers can create fantastic, professional-looking campaigns using their seemingly bottomless supply of features and templates. Crucially, MailChimp has the ability to integrate with the big-hitting eCommerce providers like Shopify and Magento, so customers can utilize your purchase data to enhance emails.

Campaigner

If you want full control over your emails; want to sculpt and manage each element down the fine minutiae, Campaigner is loaded with some really advanced features.

Customers can send emails according to highly-defined triggers, including customer habits and purchase history. An excellent, rigorously adaptable tool that will suit any business looking for very specific results.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is straightforward to operate, has more than enough features and won’t make a huge dent in your marketing budget. Campaign Monitor's biggest strength, however, is its brilliant AppStore.

Here you’ll find a deep well of applications and features that Campaign Monitor can happily integrate with to enhance your email newsletters.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign provides its customers with everything they could possibly need for an effective email newsletter campaign—as well as some neat advanced automotive features within its CRM system and contacts and list management.

It also gives customers the ability to auto-respond, an attribute that can be fine-tuned based on highly-specific parameters.

Email subject lines

Think of your subject line like a catchy headline for a news article. Your email could contain the unpublished works of Shakespeare, and nobody would read it if the subject line wasn’t engaging enough. Which, in business terms, would absolutely nuke any marketing campaign you’d spent hours concocting. If the customer doesn’t actually read your newsletter because of a dud subject line, then, well, what’s the point?

It’s worth devoting significant time on crafting a lively and engaging subject line, then; it deserves as much attention as the actual content of your email. Perhaps the best advice is to tread a careful path between overt and suggestive. Either outline exactly what the customer can expect to find in the email once they’ve decided to click, or provide them with a teaser trailer.

For the second option, we’re not suggesting the obnoxious, capitalized ‘YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THIS PERSON SAID ABOUT THIS’ variety of subject line. Just a subtle, enticing statement that’ll tickle the curious bone of the reader. Something that will positively convince them that opening the email is the right choice.

Email newsletter design

Once you’ve settled on an email marketing tool that’s going to fulfill your needs, it’s time to think about the visual aspects of your newsletter. How is the thing going to look? What graphics will you use; or will you stick to a predominantly text-based email, for a more personal touch?

Handily, the very best of these apps will supply you with a good selection of templates that you can use for the foundation of your newsletter. With the building blocks in place, there’s plenty of room for maneuver. You can drag, drop, sculpt, refine and tailor your newsletter to suit your own specific company branding. This template can then be used for all your future newsletters.

Don’t worry about the smell; that’s just you cooking on gas.

If your design skills are a little...indelicate, shall we say—perhaps your best work is limited to drawing squiggles on Microsoft Paint—it could be that hiring a graphic designer is a smart option (we also design newsletters, just FYI). Generally, however, these tools are pretty user-friendly and you should be able to brew up a visual storm for your newsletter.

If you'd like control over the regular newsletters that you send, but need a hand getting the design ball rolling, then get in touch. We can create a branded template for your email newsletters then you just need to amend text and images for each email the you send.

Some top tips for your email newsletters

Punchy, engaging, relevant

No one wants to read Paradise Lost on their lunch break; so keep things snappy. Outline exactly what you want to say without bombarding the customer with an avalanche of information. You want to engage the reader long enough for them to absorb the vital content.

Warning: graphic images

Graphics can be a great way of visually spicing up the overall look of your newsletter. But don’t let them become a distraction. Too many shiny baubles in the mix will avert the attention away from the key purpose of the email: to inform the customer.

Brand identity

Regardless of the content of your newsletter, no matter what product or seasonal message you’re trying to convey, your branding should be consistent and immediately apparent.

Adopt strict brand guidelines; keep colour schemes and design elements uniform in all your newsletters. The customer should be able to open any email from your company and have an instant feeling of familiarity. In the long term, this will help build your brand and promote a sense of trust with your customer base.

Convenience is crucial

It doesn’t matter if your newsletter is a dense landslide of information, or a breezy few paragraphs, some customers will simply not wish to wade through your email looking for the section which is relevant to them.

Here’s an idea: pop in a table of contents and use anchors to link each item to their specific section. Simple to implement and super convenient for your customers.

Embrace mCommerce

It’s predicted that mCommerce is set to count for 54% of overall sales in 2021. With those eye-watering figures, it’s understandable why companies would want to immerse themselves in this ever-expanding trade avenue; businesses should do everything they can to make sure their output is compatible.

Your email newsletters should be fully-optimized for mCommerce at the risk of losing out on enormous trade opportunities. This is the future, and companies need to adapt their processes to stay in touch with their competitors.

Lets Get In Touch With Your Customers!

We're run through the tools to help you create your emails and some of the key factors to consider, as well as our top tips for success. It's time to start firing off those communi-kays off to your customers, your potential customers and those lapsed customers you used to know.

Leveraging your list of contacts is a great way to improve your bottom line, as the people who have agreed for you to get in touch are likely to be a very well primed audience for your product or service.

If you're still looking at a blank page, try reiterating content that you've posted elsewhere - are there any exciting updates in your social feeds about your company? Or have you written any great blogs perhaps...

If you'd like help with the design, copywriting or concept ideas for your email newsletter then feel free to get in touch - it's what we do!

Other Relevant Resources

There's always more to learn, we recommend these blogs:

What is Clickbait and Why Does It Work?

What is Content Marketing?

10 Reasons to Work with Sonder Digital

10 Critical UX Mistakes In SMB Websites To Avoid

Back to All Resources

Posted on March 15th 2021

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