Newsletters are perhaps the most effective way to communicate with your customers and prospective customers. It allows you as a business to position yourself as an expert in your industry as well as promote your products and services. Newsletters, if done correctly, can be a very powerful tool in your marketing communications tool box. This article explores important tips that will help you write effective newsletter articles.
Keep your promise
As readers we are bombarded constantly with a baggage of marketing messages; most are mundane and lack any pizazz! When writing your newsletter articles, use your personality in a conversational tone, but be careful and avoid the use of slang unless your audience understands your slang or vocabulary. Humor is always welcome, but only in articles where it would be beneficial. Remember to be complete in your thoughts and writing by providing the following information in your article: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Similarly, if you promised them news updates and information but end up trying to sell them a product or service, then again expectations don’t meet reality and you could end up with a few unsubscribes, or worse still spam complaints.
Provide useful information
Provide you your audience with valuable and useful information. Teach them something new or give them some interesting bit of information on your industry or how to use your products and services. What you want to do is avoid a hard sell by filling your newsletter with advertising and promotions. This is a guaranteed way to lose readers over time. If the marketing goals of the newsletter are not defined or are unclear then much confusion about the newsletter can result.
Avoid jargon
There’s nothing more embarrassing and a credibility killer than a well written article that provides no facts or incorrect facts. If you are writing on information that requires statistical information or factual support, be sure to research your information and cite it in your work either directly in the article or as a footnote. If you are writing a newsletter you should break your language down to what the average reader will be able to understand. So, avoid industry specific jargon (technical terminology) unless you are certain that your audience will understand it. Sending unwanted email does nothing more than waste the subscriber’s time and your time as well.
Make it mobile friendly
We are more modernized and hence most of us are really interested checking our mails over the mobiles and tablets. So make sure your mailer design doesn’t break on different devices. Even the best newsletter content can lose all its impact if it creates mess on somebody’s phone. Instead design it in such a way that people don’t mind spending a few extra minutes reading through it on a smaller screen.
A newsletter is all about planning in advance, and it should reach the expectations of your subscribers and maintaining the right kind of balance between information and promotion. Even with all the spam complaints, people are ready to grab the necessary information and always ready to be in touch when something really interests them.
If you follow these simple newsletter writing tips, you’ll be on you your way to creating some outstanding articles and newsletters. In addition, if you are consistent with your mailings, you’ll begin to see results from your hard work.