Most of us receive many email newsletters every week – but how many do we bother reading?
It seems to me that some are getting a bit beyond their original intentions – far to much “look at me” and not enough of what you want to read – less of the content that is worth us spending our valuable time reading.
Let’s face it, we are deluged with “information” and too much of the useful, readworthy information that we want is tucked away between advertising and utter nonsense. If you want to reach your reader, don’t make us hunt down the value in your newsletter – just give it to us!
Taking note of what your readers really want can even end up saving you time. An excellent example is Mark Lee; he’s recently reviewed the format of his newsletter for and about accountants – now it looks like a personal email from him – no distractions at the top – straight into the news with no faffing about (and fewer italics!). Some weeks ago he asked his readers for feedback and has acted on it – good marketing strategy in action.
Others, sadly, are going from mediocre to worse…
- One network’s newsletter just landed, headed by a goodly chunk of imagery that was of no value, that I could see, which turned me off before I’d got to anything to read-worthy!
- Another today had white text on a green background which was too hard to read,
- and yet another always includes header images made up of photographs of the writer – far too “me-me” for my liking.
- The worst is a weekly missive so poorly formatted that it embarrasses what purports to be a professional business – and not only is there no option to unsubscribe, but they don’t seem to read emails gently suggesting a more agreeable approach!
You’re wasting your time, at the very least, if you don’t respect your readers. I know that sending out email newsletters is something most of us can do with relative ease, but if you need some expert guidance, then find it and take heed of the advice offered. I’ll review my favourites for this soon – if you have any recommendations, please share them.
It’s a bit like creating a website with WordPress – just because we can all do it, does not mean that we can all do it well – there is still room for expertise to be sought – we need to know when that is going to be more beneficial to our businesses than all the DIY that we try to do these days – but that’s for another blog…
Interesting thoughts Babs. Being a person that designs email for targetted campaigns , I subscribes to peoples newsletters for fun just so I can marvel in how poor people attempt this, I quite love what you write – and yes…
…most of the news is drivel, pointless, boring, not newsworthy and some people would do better not to send anything. Policy behind using email for marketing is something people just never seek advice about. It is a shame as we always do pre-sales consultation before agreeing any order.
As the owner of a design firm that churns out branded email and as a company that designs targetted email to specific user groups, I find it great that the market is awash with such poor excuses for email marketing.
We’ve never marketed ourselves by email, other than our regular daily email – funnily enough we advertise – but maybe just maybe we will install a few email processes for ourselves one day.
Fab.