How To Improve Your eNewsletter Content

If you’re not a marketing whiz or a copywriter, crafting the perfect eNewsletter can be stressful. Email marketing is known to build relationships with past and future customers, and creating the right content can lead to sales leads. Read below to learn how you can improve the content of your eNewsletter and get more readers to read your email campaigns instead of deleting them.If you have not signed up for an email marketing software, check out this Email Marketing Buyer’s Guide, or you can review the email marketing companies here.

Subscribe to Other eNewsletters

A great way to discover what is effective in your own eNewsletter copywriting is to see what others are doing. Not only will it give you ideas for your own email campaign, but you can see types of writing and content that you do and do not like.

Learn What Interests your Readers

Check out relevant online forms, social networking sites and blogs that your readers probably visit regularly. You’ll get a better feel for what topics get a lot of coverage and generate the most interest among your readers. You can also take your search offline by drawing on market research and mingling with customers to see what they they’re interested in.Tynt is also a great tool that will give you insight on what your readers are interested in. This solution adds attribution to anyone who copy-and-pastes content from your site, but also gives you analytics on content that is shared most often by your readers, keywords they searched to find your content and topics that readers left your site to find more information. 

Find Out What Is Trending In Your Industry

There are many great, FREE, resources to help you understand what is trending within your industry. Google trends is a great option (shown below). Check out this post on how to use Google Trends to identify content that is most valuable to you. There is also a great tool by HootSuite, called What the Trend that will show you trending Twitter topics in real time, trends for the day/ month or you can customize the trends that are important to you or your newsletter recipients.

Get Ideas from Customer Service Reps

Talk to the people who interact with your customers on a regular basis, such as sales or customer service reps. They should be great sources of information on what your clients have issues with or questions about regarding your products or services.

Recycle Content

While it can certainly help, you don’t have to come up with new, original content for your eNewsletter. If you wrote a great blog post and want your readers to read it, feel free to reuse that content in your email campaign. Not every client of yours will read every bit of content you put out there, so it’s okay to recycle some of it.

Ask Readers for Suggestions

In one of your eNewsletters, you should consider leaving a space for readers to suggest topics they’d like to see covered. If you encourage reader feedback, you can create a community and a trusted relationship between your company and its customers.

Reduce Frequency of Sending Emails

If you have trouble coming up with unique and informative content for a eNewsletter, consider reducing the frequency in which you email your newsletter. It’s better than having your readers getting burnt out on your email campaigns.

eNewsletter Content Ideas

You need to draw in your readers so they don’t delete your eNewsletter or mark it as SPAM. An eNewsletter is only worthwhile if it offers the reader something useful and relevant to them. Fill your newsletter with articles that they can’t wait to read, such as:

1. Solutions: Identify common problems faced by your readers and suggest solutions. These don’t always have to be your products or services, as excessive self-promotion can be too self-serving.
2. How-tos: Write a guide on how to use a particular product or service.
3. Top tips: Create a series of tips that helps your readers and is relevant to your business.
   1. There is a great tool called List.ly that is very helpful in curating content for these kind of lists.
4. Opinion: Write an analysis on a relevant topic or new story that’s pertinent to your industry.
5. Case study: Produce a case study featuring your product or service, but make it more than your average, bland case study. Include practical details your readers can learn from.
6. Reviews: Review useful tools or services your readers would be interest in—but steer clear of competitor products.
7. Best of: You can always reuse content from past eNewsletters if the content would be relevant and fresh for your current email.
8. Resource links: Point your clients to other useful resources.
9. Answer feedback: Answer reader questions.
   1. Feedback can also be taken from your Twitter followers, Facebook interactions, LinkedIn Group Discussions and more.
10. Interviews: An interview with an interesting subject—whether a top client, the CEO of the company or an expert—grabs readers in.