Your newsletter is boring, try this instead
5 ways to spice up your emails so you actually get engagement & sales
Your email newsletter is not your diary where you update subscribers on the most thrilling and more likely most bland parts of your life. Your email newsletter is not a copy and paste of what you put on your blog. Your email newsletter is not going to work if you information overload your subscribers on a weekly basis.
Your email newsletter is your chance to build your relationship with people who like you enough to share their email addresses with you and continue to receive emails from you on a regular basis. In this day and age, that’s a tough sell. Checking our email inboxes feels more like a chore than anything.
Write an email newsletter that they look for in their inbox, not debate whether to bother opening it or not. It will not only benefit them but your business as they’ll be impressed enough to engage with and even buy from you.
Invest in others and they’ll invest in you. Here’s how…
Tell a meaningful story
Now I’m all about a stream of consciousness. Virginia Woolf is a feminist icon! But it has a time and place. Your email newsletter isn’t it. That’s not the kind of content email subscribers want to read.
So while stories are a super powerful way to demonstrate a point and communicate feelings, you’ve got to trim it into shape. If it isn’t directly relevant to your ideal client and takes longer than 200 words to explain, ditch it.
Add a survey
Email newsletters can fall into the category of professionals overexplaining their professional opinion. So give your subscribers a chance to have a say. What are their thoughts on the topic in question? What’s their experience and perspective? It gets them engaged and interested in you - someone who values their voice.
Plus, it’s good customer research in itself. So why not add a quick one question survey that gets them to share their thoughts about what you’ve discussed? It could be as simple as a statement that they agree or disagree with or a multiple-choice question.
Quiz their knowledge
Now for this one, you’re asking them questions but with a different purpose. Instead of tapping into their experiences and opinions, you’re tapping into their knowledge bank. It’s a fun way to get your subscribers to engage with a topic before explaining what the ‘right’ answer is.
It also gives them the motivation to keep reading the email. If they get the question wrong, clearly they need to know more about the topic. You can make it silly to prove a point if you want!
Include a video
We all have different preferences and different ways of processing information. Cater to those different needs. Clearly, I love reading. It goes hand in hand with the love of writing.
But other people are more into visual or audio communication, especially with our shrinking attention spans these days. Adding a video of you talking about the topic of the email covers all bases and reminds them of the person behind the email.
Create a need to respond
In a world of endless to-do lists, we just don’t do things we don’t feel compelled to do. We can’t respond to every email newsletter we receive to make the person sending it feel good. So you’ve got to create a need to respond to the email and encourage subscribers to take some kind of action. This is harder than social media because subscribers can’t just like or comment on the content.
Instead, you could ask them to forward the email to someone they think would find it useful or even reply to the email to get something from you like personalised feedback and thoughts. Make sure you ask for the response and then give a reason to respond.
See, emails don’t have to be boring. They can be really fun for you to write and for your audience to read and engage with. My best piece of advice is to do something unexpected. We aren’t often surprised by the emails that take up our inboxes so that’s a good way to stand out.
For support with how to structure the content in your email newsletter (my teach, facilitate and motivate triad followed by a transition to a call to action) consult The Content Oracle. By joining my monthly membership you’ll get access to a vault that is constantly being updated with new content structures and marketing resources. It’s cheap & cheerful, grab & go, strategised & totally you at the same time.
Ready to love writing your email newsletter again?