Building an Efficient Newsletter
4 mins read
How can you make your newsletter more engaging for your subscribers? That’s a question you might have found yourself asking multiple times. Throughout our experience on both sides, as subscribers and as senders, we gathered some elements we consider essential when it comes to engaging newsletters.
What is a newsletter?
The most common approach to content marketing, newsletters consist of scheduled emails sent to subscribers, containing relevant information to them. Consider it a type of news release that publicizes relevant news, articles, and content often associated with special offers or benefits. For a higher clickthrough rate, here’s what you should keep in mind:
1. Find an objective
What do you want to achieve through this newsletter? Maybe you want to increase sales, keep your customers loyal, or just inform customers about your company’s updates. Whatever the reason is, you must consider creating clear, SMART objectives and add the most relevant content for this specific objective.
2. Remember who you’re writing for
You may be adding relevant content for your objectives, but what about your audience? Define your target audience by creating a persona and keep it in mind at all times. By choosing your focus, the newsletters’ content will be more relevant to your audience and the objectives set in the previous step.
3. Pay attention to your header
The header is the very first thing your subscriber sees when opening your email. So it’s up to you to make it unique and recognizable. Your readers need to know that they are opening your newsletter. You’ll be It will make it more recognizable for them, especially if they’ve read it in the past. Do you want to give your newsletter a name, a logo, a catch-phrase? Let your creativity flow and create a newsletter to match the identity of your company.
For our newsletter, we had a long list of possible names, but we chose to stick with “Fresh de Grapefruit” (Grapefruit Fresh), due to the change in our main strategic direction (shifting from branding to digital). The dual meaning of the name, having a new and fresh type of content and a deliciously refreshing drink, made us fall in love with it. Then, after several days of logo research, we found the best style to match it and started sketching.
4. Don’t neglect your footer
Your footer should mostly contain your information or social media in order to have them aware of all channels they can engage with you. This is a good practice to make sure you can receive feedback. If your readers would like to give their inputs about your newsletter, having the contact part helps. Through the footer, you can also encourage your readers to share your content further with their friends.
5. Be consistent
Respect the subscription plan of your readers. If they opted for biweekly, don’t send them weekly and vice-versa. By offering them the option to choose how often they want to receive newsletters, you’ll have a lower chance of people unsubscribing or being reported to spam. It seems intuitive but you’ll be amazed how many people ignore this factor.
6. Visuals can add up more value
The average subscriber spends approximately 51 seconds reading a newsletter. Also, they tend to spend 69% of their time viewing the left half while only 30% is spent on the right half. By creating a design that’s adapted to these factors, you’ll be making sure that your newsletter will catch the readers’ attention and will be read afterward.
This is the final design of our newsletter, Fresh de Grapefruit combining both our creative personalities, our passion and our professionalism in which we take pride in:
7. Try A/B testing
To make sure your newsletter is relevant to your readers, try A/B testing! Make 2 variants of your newsletter, send them to 2 different groups of people and analyze which one had the highest open rate and click-through rate. It’ll give you a direction on what type of content should you focus on for a more engaging newsletter.
Thank you for your attention and stay tuned. There is a lot more coming.
