Email marketing is the best way to directly communicate with your target audience, helping you to skyrocket your conversions and sales. In fact, email marketing generates the highest return on investment (ROI) out of all marketing channels, which is why you’ll need to perfect this art if you want to maximise profits.
Email marketing achieves this high ROI through a variety of methods. For example, welcome emails increase engagement by giving customers an insight into your top-performing products and abandoned cart emails increase sales by reminding customers to complete purchases. Best of all, these emails are entirely automated, meaning that they require little maintenance once they’re set up.
However, automated emails work best in combination with manually created emails like newsletters. Email newsletters should definitely form part of your email marketing strategy, and here are a few reasons why:
- They increase engagement by reminding your subscriber list about your business.
- They help you share important information and updates with your customers.
- They promote new products, sales and upcoming events.
Email newsletters are a great tool to have in your marketing arsenal, but how can you use them effectively? How can you extract the most value from this technique? Keep reading this practical guide to find out more about how to offer value in your email newsletters.
Subscriber Fatigue and the Importance of Value
Subscriber fatigue refers to a feeling of disengagement experienced by consumers when they feel overwhelmed with the number of services they’re subscribed to.
The subscription model has dominated our lives in recent years. From bills to entertainment and everything in between, there’s a subscription service you can pay for. Nowadays, people even use subscription services for things like food and razors.
These subscriptions have cluttered up our lives and our email inboxes. Every day, the average consumer could receive dozens of emails from various subscription services, which leads to them feeling overwhelmed by emails and potentially clicking ‘unsubscribe’.
As a business owner, how can you compete in this oversaturated market and keep customers engaged? The simple answer is to offer value to your customers. Rather than sending out boring or even spammy email newsletters, you should focus on delivering high-value content that both informs and entertains.
How to Offer Your Customers Value and Avoid Subscriber Fatigue
So, how do you ensure that all of your newsletters offer value and are able to compete in a cluttered inbox? Here are the best tips to follow:
- Research your audience
You won’t know how to offer value to your audience if you don’t know what they’re looking for. This is why it’s essential for you to conduct in-depth research on your target audience before you start writing your newsletters.
Consumer insights, engagement metrics and sales data can help you understand more about your customers, which will make it easier for you to plan interesting topics for your email newsletters. And if you’re still unsure about what to write, then why not send out a survey to your customers to ask them what they’d like to see?
- Write relevant and exclusive content
In addition to tailoring your content to your customers, you should also make sure your email newsletters are relevant to your business without making them too ‘salesy’. Your automated emails will probably focus more on product promotion, but your newsletters could include informative content about your business or current trends in the industry.
For example, if your business offers tax software, then your email newsletters could focus on current economic and technological trends. If you sell clothes, then discussing fashion trends would be both relevant to your business and interesting to your fashion-conscious audience.
You can increase the value of your content even further by making it original, exclusive and packed full of high-quality information. Offering up-to-date, exclusive content will keep your subscribers engaged, and to provide even more value, you should include plenty of actionable advice that readers can implement right away to improve their lives. This will definitely keep them coming back for more!
- Keep your content simple and concise
Although it’s important that your newsletter content is high-value and informative, this doesn’t mean you should overwhelm your readers with massive amounts of text and obscure language. Powerful, engaging content is clear and concise, so make sure you limit the length of your content and keep it easy to understand.
Tone is another factor you should pay attention to. To be more relatable to your audience and create a strong connection, you must write in a relaxed, conversational tone that sounds natural to the reader. They won’t engage with content that sounds overly formal and stuffy.
- Use an eye-catching design and interesting visuals
Presenting high-value content to your audience isn’t just about the text itself. You must also consider the elements accompanying the text: the design, layout, pictures, and even videos.
Clunky design is an immediate turn-off for consumers. They want to see email newsletters that are well-presented, sleek and consistently branded. This will be aesthetically pleasing to your readers whilst also increasing brand awareness and authority.
Including pictures is also a great idea as they’ll break up the wall of text, making your content easier to digest. In addition, images can add extra information to your email newsletter. If you want to go one step further, you could even include a fun and informative video alongside your content to boost engagement.
- Optimise your emails for mobile users
What makes email marketing so lucrative is that people are always checking their emails throughout the day, whether that’s on their desktops or their phones. And since many of your customers probably open your emails on their phones, you need to make sure your content is optimised for this device.
Nowadays, all online content must bear mobile users in mind. This means that your email design needs to be responsive to all devices and all email platforms. Using designs that don’t work on mobile phones will just make your business look unprofessional and sloppy.
- Write attention-grabbing subject lines
The email’s subject line is the first thing that the consumer sees, which is why this is one of the most important elements to get right when creating email newsletters.
The key is to make these subject lines as attention-grabbing as possible without using blatant clickbait; this will only irritate customers and make them view your content as low-value spam. For example, you could advertise a promotion or touch upon a trending topic to generate interest, or you could try using emojis if this is appropriate for the content.
- Personalise your emails
Another strategy for improving your subject lines and your content, in general, is to add personal touches. Including the reader’s name in the subject line is a great way to create a stronger connection with them and encourage them to click, and addressing them by name within the content will make them feel more valued as a customer.
Collecting more data on your audience will help you add these personal touches to email newsletters. Therefore, asking for the customer’s name when they sign up for your newsletter is something you should definitely consider doing.
- Follow a consistent schedule
Finally, if you want to offer a high-value service to your customers and avoid subscriber fatigue, you should consistently upload new content to keep consumers engaged. Sending out your email newsletters regularly (perhaps monthly or bi-monthly) will also make consumers anticipate and look forward to your content.
By following a consistent schedule, you can also take advantage of current trends. Linking your content to current trends and events will make it more relatable to readers.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing, and email newsletters, in particular, can be an incredibly powerful tool for your business. So, don’t waste this opportunity by providing low-value content that doesn’t interest your target audience.
To avoid subscriber fatigue and increase engagement, you need to offer high-value newsletters that follow current trends, offer interesting information about your industry or business, work well on all devices, and grab your audience’s attention. Once you focus on these key factors, you can watch your conversion rates and engagement soar.
