The Shark Tank

Any business or organization has a specific core audience they want to connect with. Although other digital communication methods have grown over recent years, email remains a strong communication medium for businesses to reach their target audience and measure their return on investment. 

This may come as a surprise to business owners who may feel that newer communication mediums such as social media are the end all be all in today’s world. While it is advisable to diversify your strategies to reach your target audience, email marketing is far from being ruled out as a viable option for building relationships and generating business. However, before spending the time to invest in creating a beautiful newsletter, you should understand the dos and don’ts of newsletters so you don’t waste your time or your audience’s time. Here are the following do’s to begin a newsletter and reach your core audience effectively!

Newsletter Dos

1. Understand who your core audience is: As a first step, an email marketer must understand the goals of the newsletter. Who will it be sent to? What value is in the newsletter? How often will it be sent out? Having this information beforehand is key to reach the goals of your newsletter.
2. Use design to guide the reader: Visually, it is important to ensure that a reader can read the text. Some newsletters can have information written in very small font, or written in a scattered format that is hard to read. A good newsletter design can help guide a reader through the content and visually distinguish different sections. 
3. Stick to the stuff you “all” know: Your audience subscribed to you for a reason! Make sure your content is catering to their likes and interests. Your company has a specific goal and mission that has piqued their interest in the first place, so making sure you are drafting relevant content to keep this engagement going is one of the most important things you can do to have a successful newsletter.

Newsletter Don’ts

1. Don’t use spammy subject lines: Just as how you are likely annoyed by a misleading news headline, don’t be misleading by using a clickbait subject line. While you should still work on crafting a subject line that entices your audience to click through to your newsletter, it should be accurate based on the content of the email. A trick to help with this is to craft the subject line after drafting the email, not before. This can help you better summarize your content, rather than trying to draft content to fit your subject line.
2. Don’t send an email to fill a quota: Having a regularly scheduled newsletter or other marketing emails can be great for keeping an audience engaged. But if you’re not careful, this can lead to your business sending out an email full of nothing for the sake of hitting your quota. To determine what your regular schedule should be, consider what valuable information you want to add to each newsletter, and how often that information might change or have an update.
3. Don’t send a blog/essay as a newsletter: While you may be excited about what you have to share, a newsletter should concisely convey this information. Studies have proven that long bodies of text in an email can discourage a reader from reading the information. In some cases, it can even lead to audience members unsubscribing. If you have additional information to share but are worried about overloading your newsletter, consider posting the full length information as a blog on your website and then linking to the blog from a brief section in your newsletter.

By keeping to the dos and don’ts mentioned above, any business or organization can create a newsletter that accomplishes its goals by providing value to both the audience and the organization.