When it comes to your email newsletter, there is always room for improvement. You should be utilizing analytics to help you review which areas of your newsletter are performing well and where there is a need for improvement. MailChimp reports are extremely valuable to us because we are able to see who is regularly interacting with our content and where they are clicking. Over the past year, our newsletter has gone through three major changes. We want to share our tactics with you in hopes that you might also be able to improve subscriber engagement.
Following our strategy, here is how to improve your email newsletter.
Layout
We found that our original newsletter was quite long and included a lot of text. We didn’t want to overwhelm our readers and decided to simplify things. We reformatted the newsletter so that the reader’s eye would move from left to right instead of top to bottom. It helped us fit more information in a smaller space.
Less Text, More Images
People are generally attracted to images which is why we decided to cut down on text and make our newsletter more image based. We still included the title and a little snippet of text from the article, which gives the reader a reason to click through to the full article.
Highlighting White Paper/Infographics
As a tactic we use to improve click rate, we added a “give away” at the top of our newsletter and made it the focal point. For us, these give aways include white papers and infographics. Our white papers include a form that needs to be filled out prior to downloading the document. This is useful to us as we can evaluate if this lead is a good fit for our company. If so, we now have the information we need to follow-up.
Remove Extra Social Media Icons
Originally we had social media icons linking back to our channels at the top and bottom of the newsletter. We noticed that very few people were clicking on them and didn’t want to keep both just to fill space. It’s important that everything on the newsletter is there for a purpose which is why we decided to move the icons on the top right.
Our Newsletter Evolution
There have been two areas that we have seen significant improvements; our subscriber list and recipients who clicked. This is extremely rewarding because it means that people are enjoying and interacting with the content we are sharing.
Things to Remember
• Don’t overwhelm your subscribers with too much content
• Remove/rework elements that aren’t performing well
• Share content that you are proud of
• Review your newsletter performance often
• Try something new and monitor results
• Share third party links along with your own content
• Make it easy for individuals to sign up
• Your newsletter is a constant work in progress
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