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.

The first social media platforms sprung up by 1997, just a few years after the worldwide web became available to the masses. Sites like Facebook and Twitter that have been available to users since 2006 have taken over like wildfire. Given that a sheer number of users on such social media sites is literally in the billions, it comes as no surprise that businesses can efficiently, effectively and often cheaply market to potential customers through these platforms by speaking directly to your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram followers.

Studies conclusively show that users who follow businesses on social media are more likely to buy from them. Social media can also be a means through which users can leave reviews about a company. Regardless of the type of comment, it is imperative for a business it addresses it aptly and promptly. This is especially true for negative reviews.

So how should a brand respond to negative reviews on social media? Here are some tips:

Don’t Ignore the Review

First thing’s first. A brand should never ignore or even try to remove a negative comment or review. Indeed, that is one sure way to lose customers. We, as humans, have a fundamental need to feel heard and understood, and customers are no different. Thus, it is a brand’s duty to read and respond to as many reviews as possible- positive and negative alike. If handled properly, such responses can even work as an effective marketing technique. If you are having difficulty with handling the reviews or don’t have time to do it, it is better to take the help of a social media company who will keep their eyes on the reviews and will help in saving the reputation of your company

However, if you are willing to deal with it on your own, here are a few things you need to keep in your mind. The response should be personalized, addressing the person by name and acknowledging the issue that person highlighted. This is a better alternative to a generalized answer. The reply should also have a sympathetic and apologetic tone. It is important to not mention the brand name in response to a negative review as the review could then show up if the brand is searched for. For the same reason, it is advisable to mention the brand name if the reply is to a positive review.

The review should not be a long paragraph- two to three well- constructed lines should suffice. It is also important to mention that the particular issue that the customer faced is a ‘one-off’ and not the norm.
For example, a restaurant may reply to a review as follows (keeping the above- mentioned rules in mind): “Hello David. We are sincerely sorry to hear that you experienced slow service the last time you visited us. We always strive to provide you with the best experience possible and guarantee that this was an unfortunate anomaly that is sure not to be repeated.”

Reach out in Person

While it is advisable to issue one short, public reply to a negative review, that may not be enough. Thus, a business may need to reach out to a customer via personal message. While not all customers can be reached out to in this way, there are certainly positives for contacting at least a few.

For one, you can get to know more about some severe issue the customer faced. Was a sales agent rude to you? Let us know more. The details may then help you identify the agent and have them disciplined. Remember never to make excuses for what happened. It is always much better to acknowledge and promise to attempt to improve.

Secondly, contacting a person via private chat prevents a long, drawn-out conversation on a public forum. Such a back and forth brings more eyes to the issue- something you’d want to avoid as much as possible. Not only that, instead a customer is more likely to respond in a calm and collected manner on a private chat than in response to an angry rant for all to see. Such a customer can then be appeased much more effectively.

Keeping with our theme of letting customers know how much they are valued, it is important to ask customers for their suggestions on how to resolve their issues. Quite often you will receive some genuinely valuable feedback.

Provide Offline Contact Information

At the end of a personal message conversation, the customer should be provided with offline contact information such as a phone number. They should be urged to contact that number with any further complaints or queries they may have.

Think of this as the last line of defense. Some customers may be dealt with via a public reply and others via a private conversation. However, there will always be those who need an even more intimate answer- those who want verbal communication with another person. Thus, online responses are an essential adjunct to telephone helplines but not a replacement for them.

Improve Your Service

The end objective for all the above-mentioned steps is to gain or regain a customer’s loyalty. What better way to do that than by actually acting on a customer’s suggestion? What better way to show a client they are invaluable to a business than by implementing their feedback? Indeed, actions speak louder than words.

Note, however, that not all complaints can be acted upon. For example, while it may be worthwhile to improve the speed of service in a Chinese restaurant, it would be ridiculous to add Indian food to the menu just because a couple of reviews asked for it. A business should accept that pleasing all will never be possible and should instead aim to satisfy as many as it can.

A chronological list should be made with the most pertinent and solvable issues at the top and less important ones lower down. As a rough estimate, a brand could start by aiming to address about 1/3rd of the negative reviews that come its way.

Conclusion

Remember that it is always ideal to hire a social media company who is well- versed in the field of social media marketing (SMM). Engaging with customers on social media is extremely helpful in increasing brand loyalty. This is because social media can prove to be making or breaking factor in today’s environment. While engaging with customers via social media can be extremely helpful in increasing brand loyalty, quite the opposite effect may be achieved if these platforms are mishandled.