Company newsletter have had best-kept-secret status for a decade, but more companies are now waking up to the opportunities of speaking directly to their customers via the medium. That means it’s getting more competitive, and you’ll need to start looking more closely at increasing engagement, measuring performance and optimising your timing.
But sometimes, the best way to demonstrate how to do something properly is to point out how not to do it, so we thought we’d collect some of the top newsletter crimes, and how to solve them.
1. Borderline spam
OK, we hope no business still thinks email spamming is a viable option in 2021, but as anyone who regularly subscribes to mailing lists knows, there are still companies that push things into, let’s say, spam-lite territory. Unless your newsletter has to be daily (for example if it’s actually news, or concerned with the stock market, sports or such like), keep an eye on your frequency. If you’re suffering from high unsubscribe rates, this could be the cause.
2. Over the top self-promotion
Everybody understands that companies are promoting themselves with their emails. When you engage in this type of marketing, you enter an informal contract with subscribers that balances your need to promote yourself with their need to be informed about useful things. You don’t mind being emailed money-off vouchers by your favourite restaurant, but probably don’t want to hear the life-story of their new recruit or be updated on what happened at their Christmas party. Always ask yourself – would I want to read this? If the answer’s no, bin it.
3. Irrelevant messaging
Another thing no one’s interested in is your owner’s thoughts on an array of subjects tangentially linked to your core business. Unless your owner happens to be a fount of knowledge in the subject, and they’re followed because of it, keep your messaging sharp, relevant and short.
4. Unoptimised files
Are you still sending emails with embedded image or video files in their original resolution and quality? That’s a sure way to win new unsubscribers – people just don’t like having their inboxes filled with junk files, especially those that are only there for decoration. Use images sparingly, and deploy HTML to create areas of colour or other design features – that way, you can often achieve in a few bytes what a 20Mb image file does. And if you’re not optimising your emails for mobile and the range of clients and browsers, you’re already on a losing strategy.
5. No tracking
If you’re not using analytics tools to assess the performance of your emails, you’ll keep making the same mistakes mail after mail. A few simple lines of code in your email and on your website can trace user interaction from beginning to end – that’s from open rate to your checkout page. You can see what works and what fails, and steer your entire email campaign with the data.
6. Unattractive emails
The emails people get from a company shouldn’t look the same as the ones they get from their friends and family. Branding, consistency, layout and design are all important ways to differentiate you from the competition, and lend your messages an air of quality and care. Gooey can help you create striking email templates that give your mails a consistent appearance that will help them jump out of the inbox. Why not get in touch so we can start boosting your newsletter performance?
