One Ridiculously Simple Email That’ll Get More People to Click
Every email marketer
I’ve talked to eventually faces one problem:
They struggle to
consistently send emails to their subscribers.
This is a big problem.
Because if you don’t
send regular and valuable emails, your audience will quickly become
disengaged.
And here’s the scary
part: disengagement leads to unsubscribes, poor deliverability and
spam complaints. And eventually, subscribers will become so cold that
they’ll stop opening your emails.
Many businesses realize
the importance of a regular email frequency and send multiple emails
each month. In fact, in 2016, 38 percent of businesses sent two to
three emails each month while 28 percent sent four to five emails
each month, according to The DMA.
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But you may not have
time to send this many emails. Or, perhaps, you have no idea what
content to send your subscribers.
So what’s the
solution?
There’s one simple
email that’ll help.
The blog newsletter
email.
In this post, I’ll
walk you through all the strategies and tricks I’ve learned for
creating amazing blog newsletters.
Our formula for an epic
blog newsletter (Or, everything you should put inside this email)
Blog newsletter emails,
sometimes referred to as blog digests, keep subscribers engaged and
encourage them to read and share your content. And the best part? You
can create them in under 30 minutes!
Because you can follow
the same process and use the same structure every time you send this
email, you don’t need to spend time brainstorming a new whole
concept.
And, the content of
these emails is short. Which means you can spend less time writing.
Your blog newsletter
email should include links to your most recent blog posts, as well as
older and popular or still relevant blog content.
Although we call it a
blog newsletter, you can share any of your content in this email,
like webinars, videos, courses and podcast episodes.
For each piece of
content you include, write a short synopsis that’ll interest your
subscribers and get them to click on and read the post.
I typically include three or four different posts or
pieces of content. We’ve found that this number of posts gives
subscribers options to choose from without overwhelming them.
The right frequency:
How often you should send to get maximum engagement
Spoiler: There’s no
magic email frequency that leads to the best results.
But here’s the key:
Commit to a schedule
and stick with it.
When you send your
email regularly (like every Monday morning, for example), your
audience knows when to expect it. And if they love your content,
they’ll look for that email in their inbox on the day they expect
to receive it. This boosts your email open and click-through rates.
You can let subscribers
know when you send your newsletter in your sign up form or welcome
email. Check out how my favorite email newsletter, theSkimm, does
this in their sign up form:
But how often should
you send your own blog newsletter email?
The short answer: Your
ideal send frequency is unique to you, because your audience and your
business are unique.
A good rule to follow
is sending emails as often as you’re able to send valuable content
without annoying your subscribers.
There’s three things
to consider with this: your time, your content and your audience.
Your time: Determine a
frequency that works with your schedule. If you’re slammed for time
every week, it might not be a good idea to commit to a daily blog
newsletter.
Your content: Don’t
create much content? A monthly blog newsletter may be better for you.
Create tons of content? Try sending a weekly newsletter.
Your audience: Does
your audience have time to read a daily newsletter? Will they forget
about you if you only send an email once a month? Consider your
audience’s feelings and goals when establishing a blog newsletter
frequency. If you’re not sure what your audience prefers, send them
a survey and ask them how often they’d like to receive your
newsletter.
At the very least, you
should send your blog newsletter once a month. If you send it less
frequently than that, subscribers won’t be expecting it in their
inbox and may forget who you are. And that can hurt your engagement.
What if I don’t have
enough content? Or any at all?
Forty four percent of
companies say producing enough content is their biggest challenge.
And it’s no wonder:
Producing quality content on a regular basis takes time.
But here’s the good
news: There are two simple tricks that’ll give you plenty of
content to share.
Curate and repurpose
content.
First, let’s talk
about curation.
Content curation is
gathering and sharing relevant content created by other people with
your own audience.
By finding and sharing
valuable content with your audience, you can position yourself as a
thought leader and a reliable source for useful information. Your
audience will benefit from the content (if you’re curating the
right stuff), and you’ll have content to send them, even if you
didn’t have time to create any yourself.
Some newsletters are
entirely curated! And some newsletters combine their brand’s own
content and curated content written by others.
Shane Parrish includes
content from his own blog, Farnam Street, and content from other
sites in his weekly newsletter “Brain Food”:
By doing this, Shane
can send a newsletter filled with highly valuable content, which
educates his subscribers and saves them the time of searching for it
themselves.
The second tactic you
can use to make sure you always have content on hand is repurposing
your past content.
When I choose older
posts for the email, I just make sure we haven’t recently shared
that post with subscribers. And for new subscribers, they may have
never seen this content before! So resending it is a great way to
share valuable content they may have missed.
Or, you can take past
content and repurpose it in a different format. For instance, you
could turn a blog post into a short explainer video. Or, take a long
blog post and repurpose it into a few shorter posts.
Find beautiful, free
images for your newsletter (That aren’t cheesy!)
Images are a great way
to make your blog newsletter more eye-catching and break up chunks of
text.
However, good images
can be hard to find or expensive.
But if you’d like to
find high-quality, beautiful, free images, there are few sites that
can help out. Try Pexels, Unsplash and StockSnap.io. We often use
images from these sites for our own blog and blog newsletter.
When selecting your
images, find ones that are relevant to your content and eye-catching.
(Images with contrasting colors tend to catch the eye.)
For more tips on
choosing the right image, read this: 5 Tips for Choosing Images
That’ll Make Your Content Engagement Skyrocket.
Want an example of a
company whose blog newsletter images are awesome? Check out
BuzzFeed’s Tasty Newsletter. In it, BuzzFeed uses beautiful,
eye-catching and relevant images to draw their subscribers in.
Pro tip: Some
newsletters use images. Some don’t. Split test your newsletter to
find out which works best with your audience.
How to choose the right
newsletter email template
The email template you
build your newsletter in impacts how people engage with your
newsletter. The right template will make it easy for people to read
and engage with your email. The wrong one will distract them or lose
their interest.
Here are a few things
you should look for in your blog digest template:
Whitespace: Choose a
template with whitespace that divides sections of content. Breaking
up your content this way can make your email less visually
overwhelming.
Headlines: Headlines
are also an important part of a good blog newsletter template.
Headlines help subscribers scan your email and find the content
that’s most valuable or interesting to them.
Call-to-action buttons:
You can use either call-to-action buttons or hyperlinked text to link
off to your newsletter content. We use call-to-action buttons,
because we’ve found that they give us higher click-through rates.
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