Maximise your reach: Essential e-newsletter tips for small businesses

The power of the inbox

Email continues to be a strong performing channel to reach and engage your customers. Although the ROI off good email marketing is widely debated, with a google search giving me every extreme from 28% to 1000%, but what we know is that email is an owned channel. By this we simply mean that you as a small business own the data and channel and therefore, you don’t have to worry about things like is the algorithm going to show your content, it is direct access to your customers.

Also, if we use concepts such as AIDA (awareness, interest, desire and action) email tends to be further down the funnel, where customers are looking at more of a depth of relationship with you. In this blog we are looking specifically at tips for your e-newsletters which we would say is targeting people who are at the interest stage, but they may not yet be ready to purchase, they might just want information or are considering their options. This is important to bear in mind when you consider what e-newsletter content to focus on.

In this blog we will explore building a healthy list for your e-newsletter, developing your newsletter focus, themes and overarching narrative, tips for creating compelling content, subject lines that get opened and design and technical aspects of your email.

Building a healthy e-newsletter list

Having a health e-newsletter list is your foundation and often an overlooked area. We would always recommend focusing on quality over quantity off subscribers. We are all guilty of getting carried away with vanity metrics, but it is more important to have genuine subscribers who are engaged with you than lots of them that aren’t engaged.

We recommend focusing on cultivating relationships with people who really want your updates in our previous blog post we explored how to re-engage lapsed customers with the benefit being that you are starting with a basis of people who really want to continue hearing from you.

A top tip is to have an easy way for people to subscribe from your content. Examples, could be to have email marketing subscription options in your website footer or during your checkout page if you are an ecommerce website. The important element is to always have these with clear opt-in tick boxes to ensure you are compliant.

You can also provide incentives to encourage people to sign up offering lead magnets like exclusive discount codes, or content to encourage sign-ups. Our top tip is to think about how you will nurture or warm up new subscribers with a welcome journey before they start receiving e-newsletters from you. This helps set the tone and expectations of what they can expect from you.

What is your overarching narrative for your e-newsletter?

Consistency is a key element to newsletters, which goes beyond setting a schedule of how often you will send a newsletter (it could be weekly, bi-weekly or monthly) and is an opportunity to consider what you want to be known for and how your e-newsletter can add value for your customer. We would recommend creating some aims of your newsletter. For example, if we were to create a e-newsletter our aim could be to provide support to small businesses to answer their questions about marketing. This gives us a clear focus of what we would include.

Crafting compelling e-newsletter content

An e-newsletter provides a great opportunity to pull together activity happening across multiple channels into a narrative that can help position your brand. If you don’t have a content plan a simple way to map this out could be to think of a topic for each month and then identify 2 blogs, news articles or videos that you could create on this topic. Your e-newsletter can then be focused on pulling these together. Our top tip is when you’re planning each month take into account seasonal or topical inspiration.

The most important part of a e-newsletter is that it’s not a sales pitch. It is about offering value to your audience through tips, exclusive insights and helpful resources. We believe in the 70/30 rule. 70% of the content should add value/educate your audience and 30% should be promotional. This ensures that you have the right balance for your email.

E-newsletter subject lines that get opened

A good subject line will provide clarity on what the email is about and a sense or urgency on why you would want to answer it. Another tip is to test using simple personalisation, such as using the subscribers first name in the subject line where possible to increase open rates. A lot of email marketing software gives you the opportunity to A/B split test subject lines, so if you’re unsure then why not test both and see which one gets the best reaction from your audience.

Design and technical basics for your e-newsletter

Most emails are now opened on mobile devices and therefore you need to think mobile first when designing your email campaign. Our top tip is to make sure it is easy to read on small screens and that your call to action (CTA) buttons are easy to click. Avoid complex templates. You want to create content that is easy to scan, with clear headings and call to actions. Examples of strong CTAs include: “shop now”, “read more”, “download guide”.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our blog exploring tips and tricks for your e-newsletter for your small business. We honestly believe that that if you get the foundation right and build a healthy list then everything else will fall into place. If you would like help with your newsletters than get in touch.