You may have read some of the countless articles circulating the Web about how email marketing delivers just as many results as social media; in fact, the Grammar Chic blog has recently offered some strong words of endorsement for those who are interested in jumpstarting an email marketing campaign. You may even have taken it a step further, signing up for a service like Constant Contact or MailChimp, compiling a list, and sending out your first few batches of email newsletters.
And you may have gotten absolutely nowhere as a result of it.
If that’s the boat you’re in, don’t throw in the towel just yet. First of all, anything content marketing-related is going to take a little time before paying off—so stick with it! Second, rather than assume email newsletters just don’t work, you might take some time to analyze and fine-tune your email newsletter initiatives—starting with our tips listed below.
5 Ways to Improve Your Email Newsletter
If your email newsletter isn’t getting the results you had hoped for, here are five ways in which you might make it better:
- Make it shorter. This may seem a little counterintuitive—more content may seem like it should equal more results—but that’s not always the case. If someone opens your email newsletter and sees paragraph after endless paragraph of text, it can be daunting—especially for those readers who are just checking email on the fly. There is no hard-and-fast word count here, but if your email newsletters aren’t getting read then it may be because they’re too long—and that’s something you can fix.
- Incorporate other forms of content marketing. Good email newsletters provide something interesting and valuable—not just promotion. The easiest and most effective way to achieve this is to use your emails as content delivery vehicles, including links to two or three of your recent, best company blog posts. This is something we do here at Grammar Chic, and the result is that our blog gets a lot of traffic from email newsletter subscribers who don’t otherwise follow up with our social media channels.
- Make it visual. For some of our clients, we dispense with text newsletters altogether, instead sending out visual-based ones—email newsletters that are just an inspiring or attention-grabbing image, coupled with some promotional text. This is a great way to engage readers who are time-strapped and action-oriented, making it an especially good strategy for B2B companies.
- Include a testimonial. This is something else we’ve blogged about recently, but it stands repeating: Testimonials and reviews cultivate trust, which in turn facilitates action—so you should use them whenever you have the chance. Your email newsletter is a great place to start.
- Improve your subject lines. This is the #1 piece of email newsletter advice you read, and it’s #1 for a reason: Simply put, the level of appeal you have in your subject lines is what determines whether anyone actually opens and reads your newsletter. Our advice: Keep them fairly short, but communicate value. Make it clear how the reader will benefit from reading your email newsletter!
There is plenty that can be done to boost the efficacy of your email newsletter. To learn more, contact us today: Visit www.grammarchic.net or call 803-831-7444.
Amanda E. Clark founded Grammar Chic in 2008. She is a graduate of Eastern Michigan University and holds degrees in Journalism, Political Science, and English. She launched Grammar Chic after freelancing for several years while simultaneously leading marketing and advertising initiatives for several Fortune 500 companies.