How To Achieve Success With Your Newsletter

There are two things that you need to remember in order to make a successful newsletter campaign. The success of a newsletter campaign lies in making newsletters that are relevant in content and sending them to people with their permission. If you keep sending irrelevant newsletters to people without their permission, then you may just find yourself blocked from their email addresses or branded as a spammer, which could hurt your business terribly.

Getting Permission
Getting permission is the first step in making a successful newsletter campaign, and you can do this by asking people for their email addresses. If you are having trouble doing so, refer to the earlier parts of this eBook about the tips on how to successfully gather email addresses.

When people give you their email addresses, they are already giving you permission to send them your newsletters. Thus, be sure not to disappoint them – be sure to send newsletters that have great content and free of charge. You have to be careful though, of the so-called “rented lists.” Some companies will offer to provide you with a list of email addresses that you can use in your newsletter campaign. But most of the list they provide is old, unused and contains spam traps.

Create Valuable Content
After you get their permission, it’s time to send them the newsletter. But what should your newsletter contain? Obviously, it should contain something relevant and useful for the reader. A subscriber receives tons of emails nowadays, and they don’t have time to read all of them. Thus, they tend to ignore those that do not interest them.

Getting to know what your subscribers want in terms of newsletters can be a tricky task at most, but there are ways to do it. One is by asking them about it whenever they sign up through a checklist. Provide a checklist on the sign-up page with a lot of choices. For example, you can make a “what interests you?” box with a couple of choices like arts, tips, events, and so on. Here, they get to tick the boxes of the things that interest them, which serve as your basis for sending them the things that they want. Another way is to analyze your clients’ behavior. Since your list manager has a tracker, you can review the pages and links that your client has opened and viewed. This way, you can see what they are interested and what topics appeal to them the most, thus giving you an insight as to what newsletter to send them.

A Preview Pane
A preview pane allows your subscribers to view parts of your newsletter. Thus, it is important that you make your preview pane as interesting as possible.
One thing you should remember is not to add too many images in the upper part of your preview pane because it may take a while to load, putting off your customers at the very beginning. Instead, write only your company’s name as the header followed immediately by the newsletter. Most of the time, the preview pane will only show the first few paragraphs of the newsletters in order to get your subscribers interested. If they download the newsletter, that is the only time that they can view the whole thing.

Write Interesting Subject Lines
Do away with the normal and boring subject lines for your newsletters. The subject lines refer to the titles that appear on their list of emails received. If your subject line does not interest them, then you may find your newsletters deleted without being read. When writing subject lines, you have to make sure that they sound interesting. A subject line that goes, “Christmas Dinners” is not likely to attract any subscribers, unlike a subject line like: “Great and Easy Christmas Recipes.” Also, you may want to keep your subject lines short. The subject line is supposed to tell your subscribers what the newsletter is about without giving away too much information. Furthermore, most of your subscribers will not even finish reading the whole subject line before they decide whether or not to download your newsletter. Thus, make the first few words of your subject line as interesting as possible. Use a lot of adjectives and adverbs if possible, as this these easily catches a reader’s attention.

Researching on Your Topic
Before you even get to write your newsletter, make sure that you’ve done your research thoroughly. Remember that nobody loves a half-baked potato – that is nobody wants to read a newsletter that isn’t well-written and well thought of. In order to help make your research easier, you should have planned the format and layout of your newsletter.

Choose the Right Title
The title is one of the most important aspects of a good newsletter. Your title should be catchy and interesting; otherwise, your subscribers won’t even bother reading the whole content of your newsletter, no matter how good it is.

Be Brief and Concise
Avoid too many unwanted fillers in your newsletters. Don’t start by telling your subscribers something that they already know. Instead, keep your newsletter brief and concise. Go straight to the point and drive home towards the topic. You can, of course, play with words and get a little creative with your phrases and sentences to spice up your newsletter, but be sure to stay focused and on track.

Impress your Subscribers with Facts
Adding a few statistics and other interesting facts to back up your claims is one way of impressing your readers. This helps to build their trust in you and your newsletter because they know that you did your research well.

Polish Your Newsletter
Proofread your newsletter. Make sure that every detail is thoroughly covered, from spelling, grammar, and even punctuation. Your subscribers will almost certainly lose faith in a business who can’t even write in straight English. These are some of the things you should consider when writing your newsletters. Remember that your newsletters reflect what you can give your clients, and if you don’t give them something good, then chances are you won’t have any subscribers left to send your newsletters to in the future.