4 Quick & Easy Email Newsletter Tips
Are you sending out an email newsletter on a regular basis? If so, there are probably some things you can do to get more mileage out of your time invested, without too much effort. Let’s take a look at four tips that you can implement quickly and easily.
Limit Yourself
Putting too much in each newsletter is the biggest mistake people make. Instead of telling your subscribers every single thing that’s going on, start limiting the number of sections in your email newsletter to three or less.
Not sections like a short About Us paragraph, your social media links, or anything that’s the same each time you send the newsletter out. Limit the sections that are different in each email to three sections or less.
The less you have in there, the more effective what you do include will be.
I looked at some of the email newsletters we run here at T&S. Here is the breakdown of the percentage of the clicks each section receives.
| Sections | Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 77.7% | 22.3% | n/a |
| 3 | 69.6% | 18.5% | 11.9% |
Use Images
Including images makes your emails to read, and actually makes it more likely people will click on links to continue to read more on your website. 47% more likely, in fact.
Of course, you can’t just swipe images from Google Images or Flickr without getting permission from the copyright holder. In fact, people have gotten sued for doing just that.
Instead, use your own photos and illustrations if possible. If not, use an affordable quality stock image website like iStockPhoto or Depositphotos. As a last resort, you can use a free image site like Morguefile.com or stock.xchng.
Include Links
Are you making it as easy as possible for newsletter subscribers to connect with you elsewhere?
Although they don’t get clicked as often as the main topic of your newsletter, be sure to include a link to the main page of your website, as well your Facebook page, LinkedIn Company Page, Twitter account, etc.
If you’d like to use images to link to your social media, you can try the free social media icon set from Elegant Themes.
Lose the Button
Many of the sections in your newsletter probably have some sort of “Read More” link, so people can click and get the details on your website.
That’s a great idea for a couple reasons. First, you can make it easier for people to scan your email by not including every single bit of information in there. Second, it gives you another metric to help track the effectiveness of your newsletter.
Perhaps you’re already doing that. If you’re anything like us, you may be using a button instead of a text link to get people to read more, assuming it would be more effective.
Stop it!
Popular email newsletter provider aWeber did some research, and discovered that text links work better than buttons. In fact, our own mistake in using a button in our newsletter uncovered the same thing. We saw an average decrease of 1.2% in our clicks when we switched to a button.
Learn from our mistake, and don’t use a button.