Erin Colbert

Email Newsletter Best Practices

I’m actually a big fan of email newsletters - at least the ones I actively subscribe to. I like getting updates on the organization or else I wouldn’t have subscribed in the first place. What baffles me is that so many companies and groups who use email marketing still do it so poorly. 

Be sure to follow these best practices to get the most out of your email newsletter campaign.

• Establish a clear goal - determine up front what action you want the user to take. Regurgitating everything your company has done in the past month is not compelling content for your audience.
• Focus on 1 main offer - there should be only one clear, compelling offer or action you want the reader to take and then 1-2 ancillary offers at most.
• Scanable emails - how often do you scroll through and read extremely long emails? Your audience doesn’t want to either. They’re going to spend 2 seconds scanning the email before they decide to read it so make sure it’s enticing (a photo, bullet points, bold headlines).
• Link instead of list - instead of listing out articles within the email, write a short intro and then link to the full article on your website or blog.
• Segment your database - send different offers to each of your target personas.
• Track leads & customers - open rates and click through rates are not the primary metrics for email marketing, you need to know how many leads and customers resulted from this campaign.