6 Tips and Some Tricks to Grow Your Newsletter

Email DesignEditorial • August 18, 2021 • 6 minutes READ

With the rise of social media marketing, many people would think that email marketing will become obsolete. Still, contrary to what they may think, email marketing is alive and strong. Email marketing is a fantastic way to share your brand’s message, promote existing content, establish and maintain brand awareness, and many other advantages, guaranteeing you will reach at least a segment of your target market.

What’s a Newsletter?

Newsletters are one of the most common types of strategies in email marketing. They are emails containing lists of your company or brand’s most exciting content. It can be helpful to stay relevant for your audience and gain traffic. Still, they’re also some of the hardest to execute right.

Many brands are doing email marketing campaigns, inviting us to subscribe to their newsletter. Then our inboxes end up flooded with newsletters from different senders. Now, let’s be honest: We don’t read them all, but do you know what elements make a newsletter more relevant or attractive than the others?

Let us share with you six tips to grow a newsletter and some tricks to execute each one of them like a pro:

1. Set Your Goals So You Know Where You’re Going

Before you work on any aspect of your newsletter, you need to know what goal you are trying to achieve. Do you want to stay top-of-mind?; promote your new products?; invite your audience to participate in your events? Your content, language, and even design won’t be the same if you want to inform your readers than raise your sales, so you need to have your objective clear before working on it.

Here’re some tricks you can use:

1. Align the goals of your newsletter to your business goals. What you want to achieve as a company might guide you with what you want to accomplish with your newsletter.
2. Plan and Schedule your campaign. If you have a plan, then you have a traced road to reaching your goals, and with a schedule, you know how and when things need to be done.

2. Branding is Key for You to Stand Out

Your brand needs to be present and consistent with each newsletter you send. Your logo, signature colors, social media profile picture, and everything that makes your brand recognizable need to be somewhat knowledgeable in the newsletter’s design. This way, your audience can quickly know who’s sending it and what to expect from it.

Here’re some tricks you can use:

1. Place your logo in a visible spot. Your logo is the signature of the mailing campaign, so it needs to be visible and recognizable. If you don’t have a logo yet, try this free logo maker tool from Placeit.
2. Use color psychology in your favor. Using your brand’s signature colors help to make it recognizable, but stick to no more than two colors. You can also use seasonal colors to set the mood.
3. Share business information. Share something about your brand to create more engagement with your audience. Share new achievements, some of your history, or let them know when you’re hiring.

3. Design With Your Brain, Not Just With Your Eyes

Design is vital when producing a newsletter. It needs to be appealing, attractive but also practical. You need to design thinking in practicality and not just aesthetic; your newsletter needs to be easy to read, not just pretty.

Here’re some tricks you can use:

1. Choose the best template for you. There are thousands of templates for newsletters on the internet, so pick the one that best suits your needs and stick to it. Your audience will get used to the look of your newsletter and look forward to it.
2. Make it responsive. Whether you use a template or any other tool to create your newsletter, make sure it works both on computers and on smartphones. Many of your audience will be checking on their email through their phones.
3. Use web-safe fonts. The best typography styles are those you can read more quickly, so stick to the ones that work better on websites. Remember that less is more, so don’t use too many different typography styles.
4. Be mindful of the images you use. Although most people enjoy emails with pictures, it makes them heavier, and many users opt to disable them, so you need to make your images accessible. Make your content self-sufficient, so it doesn’t depend on pictures, and don’t use images to explain information. Consider avoiding using a picture as a background.
5. Use buttons wisely. If your newsletter includes controls to send your audience to your website, social media, or other sites, make them visible and valuable (and make sure they actually work!)
6. Make it scannable. Don’t assume your audience will take their time to read the whole thing (even if it’s very short). Make it easier for them to scan through it by sectioning it, and they’ll be thankful.

4. Use a Functional and Consistent Structure

Your email structure should support your content and make it easier for your audience to explore. Using sections to spread insights, initiatives, events, and ideas will give your readers a more enjoyable experience. Establishing a structure can make it easier for you to produce a future newsletter: it becomes a template for your content.

Here’re some tricks you can use:

1. Hook your readers with a great headline. Since it will be the first thing they read, you need to make sure you capture their attention with a headline that will be the email’s subject. If you make them click and open your newsletter, you’ve won.
2. Utilize a classic storytelling technique. Take your readers on a ride, make it entertaining, fun, and engaging as you tell them the news as if it was a friend telling a story.
3. Keep things short. Your main objective with your newsletter is that the reader moves from it to your website as quickly as possible. Try to make it, so it doesn’t take more than 3 minutes to read (or at least to scan through it).
4. Have a clear Call to Action. The goal of your newsletter needs to become a Call to Action for your readers, and it needs to be precise. Do you want them to buy a new product?; To use a promo code?; To follow your brand on social media? It needs to be straightforward to do (a link or button can work). If your readers respond to this CTA, then your newsletter worked.

5. Send the Best Content for You AND Your Audience

You might have a clear goal and a specific message you want to send to your audience. Still, the content you include in your newsletter must be useful for your audience as well, or they will lose interest.

Here’re some tricks you can use:

1. Make your content helpful. Create content that helps your users achieve something. Make tutorials on using your products, send educational pieces, including tips related to your industry. This will make your emails relevant and something to look forward to.
2. Create traffic to social media. This might be more helpful to you than to your readers. Still, suppose they want to get more information. In that case, you can take the chance to go even deeper with your content on other platforms, such as blogs, social media posts, or YouTube videos. Try Placeit’s free intro makers to start producing amazing video content.
3. Balance information and promotion. Let’s be honest here; no one wants to open an email full of advertising. Yes, your objective might be to raise your sales, but your newsletter should be at least 70% information, and the rest can be your promo.
4. Make it interactive for your readers. This is a great way to create engagement and to make your content shareable. Create dynamic content, or surveys, so your readers can participate. This is also a practical way to get feedback from them.

6. Always Test How Your newsletter Works

You need to make sure your newsletter is working correctly and helping you achieve your pre-established goals. The best way to do this is to test and try, so you can adjust what needs to be adjusted and what needs to be changed.

Here’re some tricks you can use.

1. Check how your email works before sending it. You can send your newsletter to yourself or to a secure email account where you can test it. Here you can see if the buttons and links are working or if the images show correctly; also, any other technicality you may need to test before it ends up in the screens of your audience.
2. Review if your audience likes it. You can ask your audiences every once in a while about your newsletter. Maybe they want more information than you’re sending. Perhaps they want more or fewer pictures or more interactive features. If you give them what they want, they’ll do the same for you.

Create the best newsletter for your brand!

A newsletter is a marketing strategy that requires investing time in creating new engaging content periodically. Still, this is one of the most effective ways to be top-of-mind for your target market and be close to them all the time.

Follow these tips and tricks, and you’ll be on your way to producing the newsletter your brand (and your customers) need!