10 Tips for Keeping Your Subscribers Engaged With Irresistible Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are one of the most powerful tools in a lady business owner's toolkit. But crafting email content that truly resonates with your subscribers can be a challenge. The heart of it all is understanding your audience, their needs and what they want from your content. When you get to know your subscribers, you can create email newsletters tailored to their interests and preferences, getting you more engagement and better results. Win-win!
In this post, we'll explore 10 essential tips for writing irresistible email newsletters that keep your subscribers engaged, with a focus on how to incorporate subscriber data and insights into your content.
Tip #1: Understand Your Audience
If you’ve been in business for more than five minutes, you know how important it is to get to know your audience. If you’re a service provider, coach, or even a product-based business, knowing your audience’s needs is literally how you stay in business!
On any given day, the people in your audience are in all different stages of the customer/client journey. Some people are landing on your list after hearing you on a podcast, seeing content on Instagram, or because a friend sent them your way. Others will have worked with you already but stayed interested enough to stay on your list. If you offer a range of products or services, it’s also a good bet that people on your list are interested in different offers.
One of the best ways to get to know your audience better from the minute they land on your list is to create a welcome sequence that involves some level of self-segmenting. It’s easy to segment your audience when you ask them right away what they’re most interested in hearing from you. You can create a quick poll or simply ask them to reply and tell you. Remember that people are never more excited to hear from you than when they have just handed over their email address. It’s crucial that you start connecting with them right away, while you’re top of mind and they’re most interested in hearing more from you!
As subscribers move through the welcome sequence and into the general subscriber list, don’t forget that you can do some segmenting, too. Create tags in your email platform that identify subscribers based on links they click, replies they’ve written, open rate and more. Your dashboard is GOLD in terms of getting to know what kind of content your audience likes!
Tip #2: Craft a Compelling Subject Line
Advertising legend David Ogilvy once said:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
No pressure, right?
A subject line has one job: getting people to open your newsletter. It’s worth spending time to get it right.
One thing you can (and should) do is A/B test your subject lines. Your email platform will send your email to a small segment of your audience and the subject line that’s opened the most during that trial ends up being the one it sends to the remainder of your list. You might be surprised how much little changes can make a difference! Changing just one word or adding an emoji can tip the scales and get your emails opened by more of your people.
Another thing I always recommend is writing your subject line last. When you start writing the body of your email, the subject line will often magically appear! As a general rule, you want your subject line to appeal to subscribers in one of three ways: benefit, curiosity, or pain point. Focus on one of those and you’re golden. (Side note: my favorite is curiosity. I like to suggest something in the subject line that will be answered in the email. When people are curious about “closing the loop” they open your emails!)
Finally, when people get to know you and enjoy your content, they’re going to open your emails when they see your name in their inbox, no matter what the subject line is. But when you’re first starting out, avoid things like “March Newsletter.” We’re trying to make great newsletters, not boring snoozeletters.
Tip #3: Make Sure Text is Easy to Read
When I open an email and see a dense wall of text, I close it and delete it quick, fast and in a hurry. Big blocks of unbroken text evoke academic papers and they often have the same stiff tone to match. Your subscribers should open your email and find it inviting and easy to consume.
It’s a courtesy to your readers to break up text into manageable chunks. Whether you do that with photos, gifs, or simply by sharing your text in a variety of formats is up to you. Remember that most of us are perpetual state of hurrying to get the essential information we need (ah, capitalism!)
From time to time, you’ll want to check to make sure your emails are accessible to people with disabilities. Remember that if someone can’t view, read, click, or understand your email, they’re not going to take the actions you want them to.
Tip #4: Keep Your Content Relevant and Valuable
Have you ever unsubscribed from a business’ emails because they were no longer relevant to your needs? We need different things at different times. As business owners, we certainly can’t anticipate where all of our subscribers are in their journey. But what we can do is pay close attention to the content that gets good click-throughs in our emails. Links that have very few clicks are, for whatever reason, not resonating with your audience. That’s ok! That’s just information you can use to recalibrate and find what is resonating with them.
A good writer (ahem) can help you strategize relevant content by looking at your insights with you and making recommendations.
Tip #5: Incorporate On-Brand Visuals
The look of your emails should make sense. Ok, that sounds incredibly vague, I know.
What I mean is that if your overall brand is colorful and bouncy, your emails should reflect that in some way. Personally, I my emails are simple text, with wide margins, a few emojis, and no more than one gif or image. But it took me a long time to land on that. I experimented for a bit but found that’s the format that works best for me and my limited design skills. You may opt for a more designed feel and you’re in luck because there are so many ways to create a beautiful, on brand email newsletter. You can work with a designer to create a header and sections or you can use a tool like Canva to play around. (Canva even integrates with Mailchimp now!)
Speaking of my emails, are you on my list? If not, let’s fix that. I want you to get my best content right to your inbox where we can bypass things like social media algorithms, hacks, getting lost in the DMs, etc.
While you’re here, you should subscribe to my twice-monthly(ish) emails. Email is my favorite place to share tips, special offers and bonkers marketing I spot in the wild.
Tip #6: Keep it Conversational
The best way to get people interested in reading your interesting, valuable content is to make them feel like you’re talking directly to them. No matter how big your business gets, your email should feel more person-to-person and less brand-to-audience. As you plan your content and begin drafting your content, it can be helpful to imagine you’re writing to one specific person. It might be a friend you know is on your list. It could be a subscriber you’ve worked with before. When you can picture a face, you can more easily get into that conversational vibe. Think about it: Even if your list has only 100 people on it, standing in front of 100 people and giving a presentation is scary to most people! It’s hard to be your usual self when you feel 200 eyes on you.
When you’ve finished your first draft, walk away for a few hours. When you come back to take another look, read it out loud. I’m serious — no shortcuts! Reading it out loud is the best way to make sure your writing sounds like you. It’s also a great way to catch overly long sentences, typos, repeated words, etc. If you’re out of breath before you get to a period, the sentence is too long!
Tip #7: Use a Clear Call to Action
Every single email you send should have a goal. The goal might be sales and it might be simple “top of mind” brand awareness — both are great. But no matter the goal, it should be very obvious to your readers exactly what you want them to do when they’ve read through your email. Is it scheduling a call? If so, SAY THAT. And make sure the button is right there, read for them to press it. If you want them to visit the landing page for a new offer? SAY THAT and make it very easy for them to do that. Something simple like “Reply if you, too, think The Office is overrated!”
A side benefit of asking subscribers to reply is that it trains their email provider to recognize you as a trusted source that your reader is interested in hearing from. That will help keep you out of the SPAM folder!
Tip #8: Optimize for Mobile Devices
According to a 2021 report by Litmus analyzing over 28 billion email opens from around the world, 53% of emails were opened on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) and just 47% on desktops. Pretty strong evidence that mobile devices are now the preferred method for accessing emails.
That means it's more important than ever that business owners optimize their emails for mobile devices. Be sure your newsletters are accessible, easily readable, and visually appealing on smaller screens. Make sure you’re using a responsive email design, larger font sizes and buttons, and minimizing the use of large images or complicated layouts. Those don’t always display properly on mobile devices.
And this is as good a time as any to remind you: always always always send yourself a test email! Open it on both your desktop and your phone before hitting send! You’ll save yourself from a world of hassles. You’ll reduce the chances you have to send one of those “with the right link this time” emails. Ask me how I know. Sigh.
Tip #9: Test and Analyze Your Results
You don’t have to do this every single time, but you should make it a habit to test and analyze your email newsletter campaigns to improve your results. As long as you don’t let it stress you out, you can get a lot of valuable information from what you find in the backend of your email dashboard.
You’ll be able to determine what kinds of content your audience is most likely to click on. You can compare subject lines and determine if there’s a pattern to the ones that get opened most often. (Spoiler: It’s going to be the ones with numbers in them!) You’ll see how many of your emails are actually arriving in your subscribers’ inboxes and how many are bouncing back from dead email addresses.
You’ll also see how many people are subscribing. If most of your new subscribers are coming from blog posts, write more blog posts. If they’re coming from the link in your Instagram bio, send them there more often.
You’ll also see how many people are — sigh — unsubscribing. Unsubscribes are actually a great sign that your content isn’t for everyone. That doesn’t mean you should change that content. Au contraire! It means the ones who really like it and find value in it will stick around. The ones who don’t probably weren’t going to buy from you anyway. Don’t take it personally.
I use Kit for all my emails. One of the reasons I like them so much is their robust analytics. They also have a ton of tools for creators. 10/10 would recommend!
Tip #10: Consistency is Key
Consistency. Yes, it’s the hobgoblin of little minds. But it’s also a really important part of building trust with your audience. Whatever consistency means for you, do your best to stick to it. There are few things worse than signing up for someone’s list, hearing crickets from them for six months, and then getting 13 emails over five days when they’ve got something to sell!
Choose a schedule you can maintain and do your best to stick to it. In my opinion, once a week is enough to keep you top of mind but not so much that it’s impossible to keep up with. Taking up space in someone’s inbox is a privilege we should never abuse. It helps establish respect and trust when you set an expectation and stick to it.
There will be times when you’ll be running a sales campaign and you’ll send more emails than usual. It’s best practice to give your subscribers the option to opt-out of a sales campaign but remain on your email list. That cuts way down on what I call “rage unsubscribes”!
And Finally:
Crafting irresistible email newsletters is essential for engagement, trust and sales. If you’re ready to stop DIY-ing yours…