An email newsletter isn’t your typical promotional email. It contains a lot of information that isn’t necessarily geared towards directing readers to a call-to-action. To make it interesting and fun for readers to read through, it’s important that the in-email content be engaging. 

Newsletters are effective only if they are well executed and perfectly designed. However, marketers are advised not to try and put too much into a newsletter. Often, we get to see examples where product updates are blended into promotional offers and blog posts. This causes the newsletter to lose focus.

According to Hubspot, an email newsletter needs solid ground to hold it together. Your audience needs to know what it is they are reading about as soon as they see the subject line. They also need to quickly identify the focus of the email and understand it quickly. This increases your email’s engagement rates. 

If your email newsletter isn’t performing as well as it should, it’s time to take a back seat and revamp your strategy. Your newsletter might even be something you wouldn’t want to read yourself. A good newsletter should be three things: relevant, interesting, and valuable. Try an email builder to be sure you will have a good email template.

First, it should relate to the reader’s interests and the things that they care about. Second, it should delight, educated, and entertain them. Third, it should teach them and give something that they would find useful. Without these basics, your newsletter will struggle to draw an engaged and consistent readership. 

Experts recommend coming up with a newsletter strategy at the very beginning. This should include the objectives of the newsletter, a way of identifying target readers, and choosing the newsletter’s visual style. These will provide the right foundation for making it more engaging.

We will share 5 tips below for building a more engaging newsletter: 

An Interactive Table of Contents for Better Navigation

If your newsletter contains a lot of content, you can make it more navigable by including a table of contents. This shows your audience what to expect as they start to read your email. A static table of contents works well. However, an interactive one makes things way better. The latter allows readers to skip to a section once they click on a particular topic within the table. This can be done using anchor links. 

The table of contents is clickable and when tapped, the page jumps to the exact module. This is one of the best techniques where the business wishes to include tons of in-email content. What’s even better is that most interactive tables of contents are supported across a wide array of email clients. They are easy to implement and do not require any coding. 

Grab Attention Using Hero Module

Make your readers feel cheerier and brighter from the very beginning. The perfect way to do this is to build a full-width effect in the hero module using an HTML background color. Sending an email filled with images could increase your chances of landing in the spam folder. This is, especially for readers that have their image-viewing capability turned off. This would mean that your email isn’t read. 

The best solution is to cut images with HTML design and plain text. The technique also works if you want to incorporate a certain color into the background of a plain text. This color could be obtained from a product image. Color-blocking concentrates the focus on a single idea and unifies the newsletter’s composition. 

Keep Things Interesting by Varying Content Width

Maintaining consistency in each module in your newsletter achieves a certain level of design efficiency. However, you can create more interest, fun, and delight by using varying content modules and asymmetrical designs. For example, you could use bold HTML color to increase the width in your opening module. Changing the width as you scroll down through the content gives the newsletter a playful and dynamic appeal. HTML background colors and large font sizes add an element of visual interest as well. 

More and more brands are experimenting with colors, type, layering images, and module designs to take things a notch higher. This results in collaged emails that look like they were handmade. Fortunately, the techniques can be incorporated easily without fuss. 

Use GIFs to Animate your Offering

A little animation goes a long way in conveying an offering or product. A static screenshot isn’t likely to achieve as much as what a helpful strategy would using the right web tools and apps. GIFs bring a sense of motion and aliveness to a business’ storytelling techniques. 

Before including them in an email, think about the story you are about to tell. Your GIFs should have a purpose. One which is well thought out could blend well with your email to give your audience a good reason why they should act. Remember to keep the file size small so that it does not take too much time to animate. You can do this by removing frames, animating the part that has the picture only, reducing colors, and cropping out what’s not needed. 

Make it Personal

The best way to stand out from every other email in your audience’s inboxes is to make a personal connection. While at it, keep it simple. Make quick responses where necessary. According to a study carried out by the Harvard Business Review, waiting longer than 5 minutes to get back to your customer’s decreases your chances of landing a new lead by up to 400%. Go the extra mile while chatting with them. They will always remember how you made them feel. This makes it extremely essential that you provide the best customer service. 

Use these tips to increase engagement in your email newsletters. If you have trouble knowing what to say to your audience, make use of an email builder which helps you create and edit email templates. Your audience will soon start to feel as if they are a part of your business. They will contribute more, share their concerns, and make it easier for you to find out what they want. Also, they are likely to refer others to your business, hence, increasing your audience.

Posted by Miley

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