Welcome to this week’s blog post.

You may have noticed over the last couple of months that the BCRS newsletter has a brand-new look. With the amount of emails that drop into inboxes it is important to engage your audience from the offset to avoid them deleting your content or marking it as spam.

With that in mind, I’m going to give you some top tips to consider when writing a newsletter to engage your readers from the very beginning.

The subject field

Let’s start at the first thing your audience will read as soon as your newsletter drops into their inbox, the subject line. This is your chance to entice the recipient to open and read your content. Make it short, snappy and meaningful. For example, using the headline ‘Read our Newsletter’ doesn’t scream ‘READ ME’ and it’s likely to be deleted without a second thought. However, ‘Lauren, check out July’s monthly round-up from BCRS’ gives personalisation to your subject line capturing the recipient’s attention right away.

Also ensure your subject line is relevant to the newsletter content, don’t trick your readers into opening a newsletter that has no resemblance to the subject line that urged them to read in the first place.

Content that’s worthwhile

This is an obvious one but is often overlooked. Some newsletters can contain a long list of adverts and no content of interest to the reader. We don’t watch the TV just for the adverts and that should be the same for your newsletter. Include content that will keep your readers interested; do you have a recent case study to share, blog posts, industry news or press releases? Adding a simple article to your newsletter is more likely to spark interest.

Keep it simple

People are busy. Make sure your content is relevant and that your audience gets the information they need/ want from your newsletter quickly and easily. Don’t waffle on when you don’t need to. Also, don’t cram your newsletters with too much information and too many different articles.

There will be lots of ideas running through your head right now about all of the articles and other written content that you can include in your newsletter but stop and think. Do all of the articles need to be in one newsletter, or can you spread them across a few? To make this decision prioritise a couple of ‘must include’ articles before moving onto the others that can be published anytime. This will make your newsletter more appealing and you’re pre-prepared with content for the next one or even two. Bonus!

Build trust

Make sure that you are consistent with content in your newsletters and that your subscribers know what to expect when they open and read your newsletter.

Keep core messages and articles such as recent press releases featured as often as possible as this is likely to be a driver for your audience to open the email. However, change it up with variety and other information too, for example, add a video or up-coming events to differentiate your content between each newsletter.

Keep to a routine

If people receive your newsletter and it’s been so long since they received the last one, likelihood is that it won’t make it to their reading list and if it does it will be bottom of the pile.

Find the happy medium to suit your business. Whether that is weekly, monthly or quarterly you will set a routine for yourselves and in turn your audience will know when to expect an email from you and will look out for it. We find a monthly newsletter works well for us.

That’s it from me this week. Take these tips and run with them! Come back next week for another topical blog post.

In the meantime, head to our blog page for more tips and tricks.

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Published by Lauren McGowan – Digital Marketing Assistant