6 Tips for Creating Email Newsletters Your Group Will Want to Read

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​Use these tactics to keep your emails out of the junk folder
 
Technology is  amazing and, for the most part, it’s improved our lives immensely. But it can also be a bit of a pain. We didn’t always leave our homes with phones in hand, but now many of us probably won’t take two steps out the door without checking our inboxes and sending a Tweet first.

An incredibly useful – yet irritating – part of our daily routine is email. The average office worker sends or receives 121 emails per day, according to technology market research firm The Radicati Group – a number projected to hit 140 by 2018. And the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that the average knowledge worker spends 28 percent of their day managing email. It would be one thing if all of those emails were useful, but in all honesty, only a small fraction falls into that category.

The time spent sorting, skimming, reading, and deleting emails amounts to about 13 hours per week, which is an especially troubling statistic for businesses and organizations that use email as one of their main tools for communication. 
 
Electronic newsletters can be an excellent way of providing customers and members with information and keeping them up to date on what’s going on. But they only work if people actually see, open, and actually read them. So, how can you increase the odds of that happening? Try these tips:

1. Work on your subject lines 
It all starts with the subject line. If you want somebody to click, you have to give them a reason to do it. Get creative, be funny, and mix it up! It can be easy to use the same subject line for every newsletter, but that can get boring very fast. Instead, try incorporating a peculiar (and relevant) fact, trivia question, or riddle that can’t be answered without opening the actual meat of the newsletter.

​2. Make them scannable 
People aren’t great readers anymore. Keep this in mind when crafting your newsletters. Use short paragraphs, bolded points, and eye-catching headlines so that the gist of the content is easy to consume, without a close read.

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​3. Give them a taste 
Short and sweet is always tasteful. Although you may have a bounty of important information to share, the goal is to get the reader to actually visit your site. Just give them enough to whet their appetite and get them clicking.

​4. Focus on education 
Some promotion is fine – you are running an organization that needs support, after all – but people don’t want to be bombarded with it. Avoid the hard sell. Focus on giving them educational content that offers value. Folks will almost always continue reading something if they find it interesting.

​5. Use good calls-to-action 
Remember when we said you want to use your newsletter to drive people to your website? Make it easy for them to do so with clear calls-to-action that will direct them to the right places. If they’re taking the time to read your stuff and want to learn more, congratulations! You’ve done your job, so seal the deal.

​6. Don’t forget to test 
Before you send out a newsletter to everyone on your list, it’s always a good idea to do a test release to a limited sample of trusted individuals. Even if everything looks good, you never know what may go wrong with a link or an image. Double check – just to be sure.
 
If you’re new to the newsletter writing game, it may take some time before you get the knack. Following the above tips can help, and so can the right tools. At memberplanet, we make it easy for groups to create and send professional email newsletters and also track them in real time. You can get started for free now.

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