Email marketing is a crucial strategy to pump up holiday sales, but don’t forget that email newsletters are important all year long. Here are the common errors you should avoid along with some tips to make your email newsletters better:
10. Overuse of capital letters and punctuation in the subject line.Respect your readers. Don’t bludgeon them with an overly anxious call to action punctuated withgratuitous question marks and exclamation points. What is urgent to you, might not be urgent to others.
9. Pictures that distract attention. We say that a picture is worth 1000 words, but words are worth 1000 pictures. Too often a picture is the first part of the email, and it doesn’t render correctly, so the receiver just deletes the email. Be sure to send a test message to yourself and see how the email renders both with and without pictures. Be sure that your message can work even if the picture is not included.
8. Text that is too long or too short. Making effective newsletters is an art. It takes practice and testing. The proper length can depend upon the topic and the audience. An article or story that is too short without enough content to provide value is not worth reading. Sometimes you can make a short teaser with a link to a longer discussion on your website. By the same token, avoid long emails. Break up a long topic into 2 or 3 emails on related themes. A general rule is to keep your message to one page when printed--including pictures.
7. The broken record. Saying your message consistently is not the same thing as saying it over in the same message. Make your point clearly and succinctly once in the message, ideally at the beginning. Ensure that your message is consistent in subsequent newsletters.
6. Indiscriminate links. The art of a good email newsletter is to show restraint. Avoid the trap of making every offer under the sun to your customer. Instead focus on one topic and one link for the newsletter.
5. Surprises: In life we like surprises, but not necessarily in the email newsletter. Be sure to discuss the topic named in the subject line, not something else.
4. Overly fancy design: The principles of “less is more” and “keep-it-simple” hold true. Today’s newsletter tools offer hundreds of templates with many designs, layouts, graphics and so on. Be critical. Does the design improve the offer and quality of the message? When in doubt, leave it out.
3. Too many topics in a single newsletter. A good email newsletter has just a single topic, no more. It’s good that you have a lot of topics. It means you can make more newsletters in future!
2. Boring subject line. If you can’t be bothered to make an interesting subject line, why should the recipient read the email?
1. Unknown sender, The recipient of the mail wants to know who is communicating. Have a real person at the other end of the newsletter. If you can make your newsletter and email communication personal to the recipient, so much the better.
Learn more
Roslyn Layton has contributed to several Boye & Co group meetings with expert presentations on digital marketing. You can find some of her talks on Roslyn's Slideshare profile.
You can subscribe to the monthly Boye & Co newsletter using the below form on the right hand side.