Articles | Tips on Creating Great Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are a great way to reach potential leads so that you can promote your business without using the hard-sell methods of traditional advertising. A newsletter allows you to build relationships with readers by providing them with useful content that is relevant to their interests. It is also a way of providing updates on your new products as well as offering coupon codes and other promotions to subscribers. Best of all, since the recipients have opted in to receive your newsletter, they are receptive to your message and more inclined to buy your product or service.

The first step in creating good email newsletters is to focus on the content. What do you think will interest your readers? Will the content be useful to them? Keep in mind that your readers time is important and if you do not catch their interest at once, they will stop reading and delete your email. Once you ve decided on the content you ll provide, make sure that you write it in a pithy fashion since most readers nowadays have a short attention span around 500 words per article is more than enough. You can include pictures to break up the text and even consider embedding videos but you should also provide an all-text version for those whose computers can t view html. Just as importantly, start the newsletter with a table of contents that will let the reader see at once what is in the email and engage them by using striking and descriptive headlines so they ll want to continue reading. You can also consider adding short descriptive text or including the first two sentences of the article along with the headline to capture the interest of readers.

Another consideration when crafting content for your newsletters is that you want to inspire your subscribers to perform certain actions either to avail of a promotion, leave a comment or even send you a feedback email. Make sure that you make it clear to your subscribers what you want them to do, i.e. by ending the article with a statement such as Tell us what you think or Join our contest . These comments can even be a valuable source of ideas as your readers may leave questions or suggestions that you can develop into full articles.

Most importantly, you should resist the temptation to use your newsletter to openly sell your products. Remember that the chief purpose of the newsletter is to build a relationship with your subscribers so that they ll be more receptive when you show them what you have to offer. And make it easy for them to unsubscribe to your email newsletters since there is no point in continuing to send emails to subscribers who are no longer interested.