Email newsletters are an excellent way to keep in touch clients and deliver content to your subscribers. The question we have to ask ourselves is how can we make the viewing experience for our readers an enjoyable one? Here are a few things we can consider when we’re thinking through the design of our newsletter.
Make it responsive
Today I checked how people were viewing my newsletters and found that 53% of my recipients viewed my last newsletter with a mobile or tablet device. My guess is that if you checked your email campaign stats you may find similar results. At this point, these numbers are only going to continue to grow as more and more people are replacing their old phones with smart phones. Using a responsive email template for your newsletters will provide a better viewing experience for your readers which in turn can increase your open and click through rates. Someone is more likely to read and interact with content that is well designed and legible.
Links to social media
If you’re posting content to your social media site then there’s an opportunity to share the content by placing links in your email campaigns. This can be done a few different ways depending on the type of template you’re using. Placing the icons at the top of your template will increase your click throughs rather than placing them in the footer where some may not see at all if they’re not reading through your newsletter content entirely. There are also a couple different ways you can handle your links. The first way being a direct link to your social media profile. The second is allowing a recipient to share your campaign on their own account by using Facebook or Twitter. You can experiment with both to see which way works best for you.
Forward to a friend
Give your recipients an easy way to share your campaign with their friends. Forward to a friend allows a recipient to fill out a form with one or several email address fields with their friend’s info. When the recipient presses send, the form will generate an email to each of the recipients entered into the form. The email will contain a link directly to your campaign in the format in which it was originally sent. The Forward to a friend functionality makes it super easy for a recipient to share content they feel it worthy of sharing with their network.
Link to your content
When linking to content in your newsletter make sure you’re providing your recipients with useful content that is relevant to them. Are you a blogger or do you frequently post new portfolio work or news? These are great types of content you can share with your customers that will drive traffic back to your website. When you’re creating your content make sure that it is relevant to your audience and will be something their interested in learning more about. Look at your site analytics after you send a campaign to see if your customers are reading the content or bouncing away from the site. If they’re staying on the pages then you’re doing something right!
Update the look and feel
From time to time make the effort to update the look and feel of your email template. By template I’m referring to the part of the email that surrounds the content. This could be done at the beginning of each year or even a couple times of year depending on how much time you have to devote to your campaigns. People like to see fresh material. It shows them that you are invested in your email marketing and want to provide a quality experience for them.
Email marketing is by far one of the most effective and affordable methods of marketing for small businesses that operate on small budgets. The most expensive part of email marketing is the time you spend creating the content. Quality content is also the most valuable part of your marketing efforts, so take the time to create content your customers can use.