Generally, an email newsletter writing services is just beginning a long and robust relationship between a company and the customer. They also nurture and guide the prospect throughout the sales funnel, from a prospect to a customer.
Newsletters writing that contain customer-centric content, personalized names, incentives, and visuals are considered powerful and impactful to boost conversion rates and businesses. However, the question lies how do you create an impactful newsletter that boosts conversion?
For that, we have compiled a detailed guide about email newsletter writing that takes a deep dive into the basics of newsletters to writing a newsletter that is effective.
What is a Newsletter?
A newsletter is a form of an email that is sent to prospects who've signed up for your mailing list, containing attractive information like engaging content, special announcements, and promotional deals. It's very beneficial to keep the audience connected with your business while gaining traffic and boosting conversion.
However, this can only happen if you write the newsletter in an effective and proper manner.
Three Pillars of a Great Newsletter Writing: Design, Content, and Value
An excellent newsletter will always start with a great design. Without a polished and receptive design strategy, no matter how excellent and compelling your content writing is, it wouldn't matter. Your newsletter writing must be easily navigable while giving clear CTAs to direct readers to your website, where the engaging landing page can help convert them. A few essential elements of a captivating newsletter include:
- Headers – Similar to a glossy magazine, your newsletter writing must include a master heading resonating with your branding and audience while urging them to read further.
- Logos – Refer to your logo to set the color theme of your newsletter. It should remind the audience that the most valuable content that ends up in their inbox is from you.
- Visuals – Whatever your brand persona is, be sure to include visuals, either in the form of a lively picture, intense illustration, or a mixture of both.
- Layout of the Content – Making use of headings, subheadings, and bullet pointers can make your newsletter easily navigable for readers. They can quickly skim without missing out on essential details
- Personalized Content – Adding a personalized touch to your newsletter while addressing your prospects can captivate attention and generate interest. An example of personalized content is addressing them through their names. However, to make this possible, you will have to connect your CRM–Customer Relationship Management data.
The content that you share via your newsletter writing must be valuable and relevant to your readers. The content must be beneficial to your prospects either by keeping them updated regarding new industry affairs or relevant tips and insights.
Brainstorm Optimized Newsletter Content Based on Audience Needs
Working in the industry, you have adequate information about it. And based on research, customer profiling, and interaction, you know your intended customers too. Your readers know you, so why would they sign up for an additional email subscription from you? What would be inspiring enough for them to sign up for your newsletter service?
Here, you're the content of your newsletter is the essence. While traditional newsletter writing copies may include a combination of wordings and visuals, directing customers to the website, unconventional ones would prefer more visuals that are vivid and lively.
To write a newsletter that is compelling, choose information or visual that is suitable and resonates with your readers. In case you're writing to a business that is also your client, such people don't have the time to go through lengthy and descriptive paragraphs. So, opt for a concise form of content, while sprinkling a bit of infographic too, to grasp the readers' attention, without a lot of focus, reading, and time.
On the contrary, a newsletter writing is generally used to provide prospects with descriptive content that isn't readily available. A newsletter writing is meant to share information that is rich in quality, accurate data that reflects, content that is data-driven and is waiting for them in their email.
In comparison to your average blog audience, a newsletter subscriber is deeper down the sales funnel. This is because a newsletter subscriber voluntarily opted for your services, meaning that they are interested in knowing more about you, and at some point, in time, they may want to transact with you. So, to give them the final push to convert, share newsletters rich in quality to meet their expectations.
Newsletters are for Building Relationships
Newsletters are a traditional content marketing strategy and date back to the times of the mailbox. Brands as large as a multinational global chain and as small as a home-based entrepreneur would make use of newsletters writing to educate and sell their products or services to prospects.
It can be effortless to dismiss a newsletter as something old school, in today's digital era, with a decreasing attention span and shift of content towards short-form social media content. However, it isn't as easy and outdated as you think. Even today, sending out newsletters can be as valuable and compelling as posting over your social media to strengthen relationships with prospective and existing customers.
Topic Creation
After building a list of subscribers, you must be very keen to connect with them. You want them to click on your email. However, hundreds of newsletters end up in an inbox every day; how can you differentiate yourself enough so your audience cannot resist clicking upon yours?
It may seem impossible to cut through the noise if you're in an overflooded industry. It would be best to come up with something fresh and valuable, involving topics interesting to your audience. The most effortless way to do this is by studying your rivals and collecting newsletter writing ideas along the road.
Collect newsletter ideas by looking up the most shared ones in your sector. List them down, and get inspired about the newsletter's style, tone, and format that resonates with your target audience. Pick up features that you wish to work on, helping you perfect your newsletter.
Content Roundups
Content roundups have gone into the fade. However, they're still practiced by a few businesses. You're most likely discussing a content roundup whenever you have a list on hand. Similar to any form of content, the quality is not only dependent upon the format but also the execution. A previous version of the content roundup is a list of crucial contents published within the given time on a specific topic.
Content roundups are an excellent opportunity to develop links, and for the reader, it contains a lot of value. However, the biggest blunder that people make while writing a content roundup is laziness. Writing a newsletter may require resources, such as time, effort, and knowledge. And at times, it may get tempting to base your work over a format, which may create a problem.
Incorporating a good editor, approach, and strategy can make your newsletter writing rich in quality and more effective. However, your aim should be to generate high-quality content for your intended audience that resonates with them. If they're not following the links mentioned or performing CTA, you need to re-evaluate your newsletter.
Company News
The newsletter writing has been traditionally only used to deliver the latest news updates regarding the industry, the company, or both. Its well-evident that newsletters aren't just produced and shared for the sake of it; instead require extensive research. However, some general newsletters include:
- Job opportunities
- Case studies or whitepapers
- Deals and promotions
- Industry news
- Internal employee news, like birthdays, anniversaries, promotions
- Monthly recap
- FAQs
Such newsletters are usually shared with the stakeholders of the business to keep them updated regarding different aspects and developments in the business. The frequency of these newsletters depends upon the urgency; in case of an urgent announcement, a newsletter may be published right away. However, generally, these newsletters are either shared annually or quarterly, depending on company policy.
New Assets
The goal of your newsletter writing can be to introduce the purchase of a new asset, the launch of a new product, adoption of a new strategy. Such milestones deserve a separate dedicated newsletter. However, be picky about which milestone is big enough to be celebrated via a separate newsletter, otherwise, you might be sending out a new newsletter every other day, bombarding the readers' inbox, and eventually ending up in the spam folder, or even worse, getting unsubscribed.
What to Include in a Newsletter
One of the most excellent features of a newsletter writing is that they don't surface as marketing. When a reader decides to subscribe to your newsletter, they are not actually subscribing to get to know more about your company and business; instead they're looking to connect, break the ice and have some fun with you.
While you want to ensure that you provide your subscribers with valuable, meaningful information, that can help them improve their businesses or ease up their life. However, value does have a few forms of its own, and information can be crucial and enjoyable and entertaining at the same time, giving you the relaxation to be more creative, fun, and compelling with your newsletter.
Some businesses like to incorporate the fun element via games, activities, horoscopes, recipes, comics, and cartoons. To increase the rate of engagements and provide prospects with a reason to connect with the company. Visuals are relatively good at seeking attention and can double as exciting yet informing. In particular, videos have been ideal to boost engagements, particularly if the element of humor or suspense is added, so time to knock the door of that comedian in yourself.
If you sell B2B, then you can share success stories of existing clients for such clients; stories and narratives are excellent ways to market your company and your offerings. Because clients are more likely to trust a consumer over your marketing team., this has proven to show positive results too.
Even though you wouldn't prefer to sound very salesy, it is your newsletter writing at the end of the day. You can use it to direct traffic to the content of your websites, such as blogs or articles and videos from employees addressing significant conferences. This can help you build credibility and authenticity about your management and helps you emphasize the competence of your workers. And diverting and boosting traffic from existing content. A win-win situation for all.
Attaching relevant and valuable links to other existing and exciting content on your website can be compelling to your reader. This will not only deliver informative value but also the validation of claims via third-party. If you plan on writing a newsletter about staying safe during a snowstorm, then you should also link up weather predictions too. Demonstrate how vital your newsletter writing is to them while building credibility and trustworthiness.
Following are a few other pointers discussed that you should add to your newsletter.
Attractive Sender and Subject Line
The sender's name greatly influences email newsletters' open rates. Apart from the body, the sender's name, subject, and opening line are the first impression of your newsletter writing over the receiver. To stand out and not look like another spam email, you can use a personal name, your brand's name, name it after a campaign, or use a friendly name.
Writing a subject line can be an extreme sport. The subject line can either be too good to resist or the entire opposite, which is exceptionally not click-worthy. And in the state of content marketing strategy, subject lines blow your load.
When it comes to the subject line, ensure to follow these guideposts:
- About 35% of email newsletters are clicked open due to the attractiveness of the subject line
- Keep the subject line not too long or too short; average out at seven words.
- The best performing subjects include numbers and titles. Conversely, the worst performers are symbols and spam.
Ensure that your subject line resonates with the body of your email, with no clickbait. Using words such as how-to, best practices, or bullet point formats can help increase the quality of your subject line.
A way to test your email subject line is by when you think that your subject line is at its optimal, spend at least five more minutes making adjustments to it; this is definitely worthwhile.
The Body
Thanks to that killer subject line, your audience has clicked open your email, and to further pull them in, start your copy with an even more killer opening line. An opening line that attracts the readers' attention and draws them in is even more critical because, along your subject line, the email shows a bit of a snippet of your email; this is visible regardless of your device. So, readers don't tend to open an email that doesn't have a killer subject and an even more killer opening line.
Try addressing your audience personally, by their name, as this increases authenticity. Cut it short, don't waste their time, and get straight to making a connection. This increases the respect your readers have for you.
Next, you have to create a connection between the opener and the body. Connect with your audience in the body by delivering the value of your product or service and how it can benefit your prospects.
Furthermore, remember to keep it short and straightforward because the primary purpose is to attain attention, create a relationship, and elevate their status in the sales funnel. Don't be aggressive right away. Disperse long paragraphs into short, easily understandable ones.
Use words such as YOU and YOUR instead of WE and ARE while addressing a few personal questions to give them a feeling that you're having a conversation face-to-face. Some good examples of such questions are:
- If you're looking to improve your strategy, how would you do so?
- Is (insert your product's benefit) at your utmost priority?
- Are you still lacking answers to questions about (insert your topic)?
Plain Text vs. HTML Emails
In a newsletter writing, the lesser content, the better. And this can be a tough pill to swallow because newsletters require creativity. However, data reveals that plain-text emails are more likely to produce better results than HTML emails. However, the decision rests in the hands of the writer.
Furthermore, similar to everything, even here, some exceptions lay. For instance, companies like eCommerce may produce better results using an HTML email, with pictures and infographics of products. So, before concluding, it's vital to test both options for yourself.
However, limiting yourself to plain text emails isn't all bad either. This gives the writer the opportunity to get creative with the subject, body, positioning, and link placements to attain the results they aim to achieve. At times, going old-school is all that you require to get the job done with excellency.
Conclusion
The bottom line remains that newsletters still have a significant influence and are as effective as any other marketing tool. While other marketing methods have their own essence, newsletters have their own. And to get the desired results, you must ensure following the proper methodologies while understanding your audience.
Newsletters can be an effective tool to communicate and advertise to your audience, and with practical strategies, a higher conversion rate is guaranteed. However, it would help if you made people sign up for your newsletter by presenting a strong CTA.
If you struggle to deliver relevant content consistently via newsletter writing, contact Writing Services Hub today and outsource your content production needs right away! They would be more than happy to assist you.