Last updated - June 1, 2023
As digital marketing strategies have evolved over the years, email marketing now feels a bit on the traditional side compared to newer approaches like search engine optimization, pay-per-click, display ads, and social media content marketing.
Email marketing platforms like MailChimp, HubSpot, and MailerLite may also seem a bit conventional compared to newer channels like Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Now, the question remains—is email marketing still worth businesses’ attention, money, and effort in this day and age?
Despite several newer strategies and approaches that have been introduced through the years, email marketing remains to be a valuable and cost-effective tool for B2B and B2C organizations to directly reach their audience and send out more personalized content than any other platform for news, updates, promotions, and other business-related messages.
According to Constant Contact, more than 90 percent of survey respondents emphasize the significance of email marketing for their company’s overall success. This finding demonstrates the widespread recognition of email as a crucial tool in achieving business objectives. Additionally, with a staggering volume of 319 billion business and consumer emails exchanged daily, it is evident that email remains a prominent communication channel for individuals and organizations alike.
Email marketing’s consistent results and ROI year-on-year are unmatched—and this is backed by data. According to the latest email marketing statistics study by Snov.io, email marketing ROI is about $42 for every dollar spent on campaigns. And compared to Facebook and Twitter, email is 40% better in terms of conversion. Marketing emails also influence the buying decision of 50.7% of email customers. The rest of the statistics indicate that email enables companies to achieve their lead generation and nurturing, sales, and customer retention goals.
But while email marketing remains a cornerstone of marketing to this day and has proven that it is here to stay, it is always beneficial to amp up your email newsletter design with tactics that complement your overall goals and plans. Read on to learn a few tips and tricks on creating high-converting newsletters.
7 Ways to Increase Conversions Through Newsletters
Generally, people receive more emails than they are willing to open and read through, making it up to the different businesses and organizations to create a well-structured newsletter that will stand out from the clutter of the receiver’s inbox.
There is a range of design templates to choose from—from long and detailed emails to short, photo-filled formats. Which is the best one for your company’s newsletters? How do you make sure it stands out for all the good reasons? How do you effectively marry design and function to secure clicks, drive results, and ensure engagement?
Check out these ways to improve your newsletters for a more holistic approach to email marketing by optimizing both your newsletters’ design structure and content layout.
Design Structure
From eye-catching visuals to a clean layout and proper placement of design elements, how you structure your newsletter can compel readers to discover what’s in it for them.
Always stay on-brand
Consistently sending out on-brand content via your company newsletters establishes trust and credibility among your subscribers. These best practices should be at the core of your branding strategies.
First and foremost, your newsletters should use the same color palette as your branding. While it might have crossed your mind to spruce things up and incorporate new colors into your newsletter design, it’s safe to stick with colors and an overall design that aligns with your brand. The goal is to use newsletters to demonstrate credibility and boost brand recognition.
Building on this element of consistency, you could maintain a familiar look essential by sticking to a recognizable, well-designed template that ties branding and marketing efforts together. Not only will this ground your newsletter campaigns, but it will also make the work easier on your end.
For instance, with a template, you don’t need to develop a new design every time you send an email. All you have to do is reuse your template and change up the content accordingly.
To stand out from the crowd, it is also essential to successfully associate a positive brand image to express your organization’s fun side while keeping your business top of mind.
Keep things simple, snappy, and eye-catching
See to it that your newsletters do not have jargon or flowery words to avoid discouraging readers and losing interest. Also, avoid adding too much of everything in a single email as it can compromise the effectiveness and potentially lead you to lose subscribers over it.
In line with that, steer clear of featuring tons of colors, images, fonts, and elements. Direct, more minimalistic emails tend to perform better than overcrowded newsletters, so make sure to convey your message in a simple and concise manner to help lead your readers to the desired action—whether to attend an event, purchase a product or service, or contact your business.
Incorporate grids into your design for faster comprehension and a better experience
Along with keeping your newsletters simple, it is also helpful to create an efficient path by using grids to lead your readers’ eyes to the desired action faster and more effectively.
It is common practice for marketers to follow an inverted pyramid layout in designing content—and it goes the same for newsletter designs. How does it work exactly? The pyramid starts with a header which will be explained later in the article, followed by a short description or an image to pique interest, and finally, an eye-catching button for a clear call to action to encourage readers to click.
Optimize for mobile
According to HubSpot‘s study released in 2022, 41% of emails are viewed from mobile devices, while 39% are viewed from desktops. As such, it would be best to incorporate an adaptive design into your email marketing templates to make your newsletters reader-friendly on desktops, mobile phones, and tablets. Make sure the buttons work and content elements are formatted correctly across devices.
On top of that, there are also various email platforms to consider—Outlook, Apple Mail, and Gmail, among others. So don’t forget to send out test emails and check your content on various platforms to ensure your newsletter template and format adapt to fit these platforms.
Always have the unsubscribe link easily accessible
In line with essential email signature tips, it is crucial to have the unsubscribe link easily accessible in your newsletters. The unsubscribe link is not only important, but in some countries, it is actually even illegal to hide it from plain sight. This is why businesses make sure to include a link in the footer that leads readers to a page where they can modify their subscription—like how many times they want to receive company emails—or cancel it altogether.
Also, neglecting to add an unsubscribe link to your newsletters will discredit your company as people generally don’t trust brands that don’t give them the option to opt out of things. Keeping unsubscribe links hidden can damage your reputation and negatively affect key performance indicators (KPIs), forcing disgruntled recipients to report an email as spam.
Content
As part of content marketing, email newsletters let you demonstrate your thought leadership through engaging, relevant information and insights that help address their pain points. Here’s how to optimize your content for email newsletters.
Make your newsletter content skimmable
Having clear sections or similar headings is an excellent practice to incorporate into your company newsletter.
For example, you can break your content into chunks and have a template with sections like Offers and Promotions, Company News and Updates, New Releases, and Events and Opportunities. Once you have those, you can opt to remove unnecessary sections for one newsletter and add sections if necessary, depending on the need.
Once you’ve established this consistency, it will help your subscribers quickly find the most relevant information they are most interested in. In this hyper-busy era where typically everyone has a packed schedule, the more skimmable your content is, the easier it is for your readers to take the desired action. In turn, you can expect to increase open rates and decrease unsubscribe rates.
Feature dynamic, personalized content for every segmented campaign
In today’s era, people put a premium on personalization. For this, companies need to have dedicated email content to specific audience sets to ensure their emails are relevant to their readers. As your brand sends personalized emails, you’ll likely see increased conversions through your newsletter campaigns.
Are you wondering how exactly this can work for your business? Suppose you have new product releases and promo codes to share. In that case, you may consider segmenting your newsletters into two separate campaigns—one for your male subscribers and one for your female subscribers.
Although the essence of your message will be the same, tweaking the content to appeal to different audience sets will likely get more clicks and conversions than a generic email template. From this, you can create more detailed mailing lists such as exclusive offers for your most loyal customers, special discounts for moms, or gift suggestions for specific occasions.
Key Takeaways
Despite several newer strategies and approaches introduced through the years, email marketing remains a valuable and cost-effective tool for B2B and B2C sectors. It has been proven to be helpful in business growth and is also consistently being used as one of the effective eCommerce strategies.
In creating newsletters, it is always beneficial to follow a recognizable template that is on brand, add eye-catching visuals and relevant images to keep things entertaining, and include a clear call to action in every section to drive newsletter readers to your brand’s desired action.
