Like writing or marketing, newsletters are one of those topics where you are always learning new things and improving on what you already know. That’s why I started this blog post series, and that’s why I jumped at the chance to attend Tammi Labrecque’s session at the 20Books to 50k conference in Las Vegas earlier this month.
I know a thing or two about newsletters, but she is the Newsletter Ninja. She has forgotten more than I have learned. Here are eight tips that I either picked up at her session, or were inspired to write down in my notes. (BTW, her session is on Youtube.)
1. Tell Subscribers About Your Newsletter’s Content
This one seems obvious, but I know a few marketers who forget that you should use your welcome email(s) to tell your new subscriber about the kind of content you will be sending them, and how often.
You might also put this info on the sign-up form, but you do need to tell them whether you are sending newsletters weekly, monthly, or whenever. You also need to let them know if you write paragraphs and paragraphs of text, or just send out links, or brief announcements.
Telling your new subscribers what you will send them gives them the chance to opt out now, which is what you want to happen.
2. Personalize Your Confirmation Message
When someone fills out your sign-up form and clicks subscribe, what does the confirmation message say?
If you are like me it will be fairly generic, but what we should be doing is using this to send a message to the new subscriber. We have their attention right now, and that is a chance to make a connection by writing something special or memorable.
I am still working on this myself, but what do you think your confirmation message will say?
3. Write Killer Subject Lines
Your subscribers get blitzed with hundreds of not thousands of emails everyday, so you need to do all you can to stand out from the cloud. People only have a finite amount of time to spend reading emails, so you need to give them a reason to open yours. You can do that by using subject lines which make them want to open your newsletter.
This is good advice, but to be honest I’m not sure this is important for all newsletters. I routinely get 35% to 40% open rate with “Weekly News Update” as my subject line, and most of the alternatives I’ve tried had poorer results.
4. Write to One Person
As an author, you’ve probably heard that you should write for your ideal reader, yes?
This is as true for your newsletter as it is for anything else you write. You should picture your ideal reader in your head while you are writing, and you could even go further than that by writing out a reader profile, listing the reader’s interests, profession, age, and other relevant details.
5. Optimize for Eyeballs
Like blog posts, your newsletters are going to be read on a screen, and given that a lot of us read emails on a smartphone, your newsletters are probably going to be read on a small screen.
The simple truth is long paragraphs of text are difficult to read on a computer monitor, and they are excruciating to read on a smartphone’s screen, which is why you should use short paragraphs in your newsletter.
Try to break up any paragraph which is more than four or five sentences long. Yes, I know that you’re worried about being haunted by the soul of your 9th-grade English teacher, but you write for the reader, not ghosts.
6. Use an Email Header that Matches Your Marketing Material
One way to connect your newsletter with your books is to give the newsletter an email header which shares the same design as your marketing material, and your website.
An email header usually measures 600 pixels by 200 pixels. This doesn’t give you a lot of space to work with, but you can still use graphics, fonts, and background colors to brand your newsletter to match your marketing material.
You might want to ask a graphic designer for help. This is one of those things which is hard to get right. I’ve been working on my email header for a few weeks now, and while it looks okay, I would not say it looks great. (I am not using it unt it looks amazing)
7. Test Deliverability
This is something I should be doing, but hadn’t thought of.
There are many factors which affect the open rate for your newsletters, and one of them is deliverability. Sometimes your emails don’t even arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes. We can’t always tell why that happened, but there are tools you can use to check the content of your email and see if it will get caught in a spam or security filter on its way to its destination.
Here is a post with seven tools you can use to test the deliverability of your newsletters.
8. Use Your Postscript Intelligently
A postscript might seem about as relevant to your newsletter as an appendix, but experts say that over three-quarters of subscribers read the postscript first, before reading the newsletter. This means that your postscript is the one thing in your email which you know all the subscribers read.
That’s why you need to have a postscript on your newsletters. You can use it to get readers motivated, offer them a special deal, or emphasize a point you made in the newsletter.
Me, I sometimes have a postscript, and sometimes don’t. I leave it out when I have nothing to say, but whenever I have info like my event schedule or an interesting question, I put it in the postscript.
How would you like to use your postscript?
Those are just eight of the tips I picked up from Tammi; did you find them useful?
