According to usability consultant/expert Jakob Nielsen, around 50 percent of readers skim or partly read newsletters. A mere 23 percent of readers will actually take the time to read the newsletter the whole way through and the last 27 percent will never even bother to open it. Below are eight tips to ensure that you maximize your potential to entice readers to view your newsletter.
- Include graphics and/ or pictures. You literally have a matter of a few seconds to attract a reader; so drawing them in with pictorial elements could be your best bet.
- Never put “Unsubscribe” in your newsletter. Many spam filters can read this word and automatically place it in a junk folder. Use more general words like “Remove me” or “Take me off.”
- Insert line breaks. Never jumble your copy together. You are dealing with a smaller frame compared to those in programs, such as Microsoft Word; so make sure that you are writing more concise paragraphs.
- Include many links to your website. Make sure that you contain numerous links to your website by making your logo a hyperlink, having text within your copy be hyperlinks and always include a copyright section at the bottom of your newsletter that also includes a link.
- Include color. When I receive a newsletter that contains a plain white background with no elements of color or graphical images, I do not even bother scanning through it. It is imperative to make your email aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
- Spell check & spell check some more. I cannot stress enough the importance of having a newsletter that is grammatically flawless. I am sure that you cannot afford to spend countless hours creating an eye-catching layout and lose a reader over a spelling error. Credibility is vital, especially when you are utilizing a medium with so much questionable trustworthiness as the Internet. The easiest way to accomplish this is to simply write your copy in a program, such as Mircosoft Word (which includes a spelling and grammatical checker) initially instead of a simple text editor program that may not have these features.
- Always Bcc. You never want to copy a thousand emails into the To: section of a new email. People do not want to see that they are one of a thousand people to receive your newsletter. Make them feel special by letting them think that you are personalizing your newsletter for them.
- Keep it within the email. Try to include the newsletter within the email itself. You will lose numerous readers if they are forced to download and view an attachment of your newsletter.
There are great services out there that offer tracking, reporting, email templates, coaching and support, such as Constant Contact. You can try it free for 30 days to see if it will be of value to your establishment. Or, you could brave it up and create your own email template from scratch and precisely tailor it to your needs. Or, you can download one of these free templates to help you get a start.