Our inboxes have never been more full. They are bursting at the seams. So, getting an email that gets you excited is a rare thing, indeed. In fact, if you send out regular marketing emails, you’ll know that it’s hard enough to land in the right section of the inbox, let alone tempt someone to open it and read the whole thing. That’s before they take any action like clicking a link or – gasp – buy something. So, knowing what gets readers excited enough to actively look forward to receiving an email is like finding your way to the bottom of the washing basket and it staying empty.
Over the next 7ish minutes of this blog, I’m going to take you through all the elements that great newsletters have in common. I’ll be showing how you can put all these parts together to do the utmost to create a newsletter that gets your readers so damn excited they can’t wait for it to land in their inbox each week.
Let’s go back to the late 1990s
It’s Saturday morning, and your pocket money is fresh in your wallet. You walk down to your local newsagent with a spring in your step because, on this wonderful day, you are going to smell the fresh ink of the latest edition of Kerrang!/Shoot/Smash Hits… (oh okay, insert in here whatever magazine you loved to buy each week. Was it More? Or Just 17? I bet it was More).
You walk into the newsagents’ with a swagger. Rounding past the sweets and car cleaning kits, you head to the racks of magazines, but alas, your chosen mag is nowhere to be seen. You turn to the counter and build up the courage to ask your newsagent where it is. “Sold out, mate. Kid came in 10 minutes ago and got in before you.”
The disappointment hangs on your shoulders so heavy you almost have to drag yourself back home because now, you need to ask your mum for a lift into town, an event as unlikely as a rain-free day in the Yorkshire Dales. Nevertheless, you convince her that this is how she should spend her Saturday, as you’ll otherwise be under her feet all day.
Finally, after navigating the old ladies of WHSmith, you find what you’ve been looking for, and now, you can enjoy the next hour reading your favourite mag. Those other kids in the street? They see it tucked under your armpit, and they nod. A slight tip of the head to let you know that you are one of them. Your magazine is also theirs.
It was a routine. You might even call it a ritual that needs to be done every week. This is what a newsletter needs to be: something so practised that it forms a part of someone’s life.
Treat your newsletter like a magazine
If you want people actively looking forward to opening and reading your emails – and you do – then you have to start treating it like a magazine. Even if you’re selling physical products from your emails.
Magazines and newspapers exist to sell products. We buy them because we’re interested in the stories. This is no different from when people would sell newsprint from the coffee shops lining Fleet Street between the law courts and the church, spreading the news of what was happening in each. The publishers would sit and listen to the gossip from the traders, solicitors and clergy, then package it all up into what would eventually become our national press.
We buy them because they tell human interest stories – the tales of what’s happening in other people’s lives, the drama and the emotion. We can’t help but be curious about the lives of others.
But magazines and newspapers exist to sell us things. All those features and adverts fund the stories that keep us entertained, but the reason they exist is that we will buy what we see in them.
They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, and really, it’s all that social media is doing as well. They pull us in with the stories about other people’s lives, seeing how they live and the drama that happens, and then we get hit by adverts.
You might think it’s cynical, but our newsletters need to be the same.
We need to start treating them like a magazine with news, features and human interest stories. We pull people in that way, and we sell our products and services as a result of this. When we simply send out a catalogue of what we’ve got to offer (I’m looking at you, product-based businesses), then all we’re doing is hoping that someone is in their right mind to buy what we’ve put in front of them.
And yes, with data we can get this right, but honestly, have you ever sat there and thought: “I really hope that Wolf and Badger email comes in today, I can’t wait to sit down and read it”?
No, you haven’t because, for the most part, emails are an annoyance in our lives. They exist to tell us to do things, ask favours of us, chase us up or put us on hold. They want our time, attention and money for little in return.
But to have an email that someone actively looks forward to receiving, that they wait to open and read, well, that’s a powerful newsletter.
How do you start treating your newsletter as a magazine?
All magazines, whether trashy or highbrow, have certain features in common. I’m going to go into them in a moment, but first, I want you to change how you think about your newsletter list. You see, many of us are trained to think about our newsletters in terms of numbers as though that is a sign of how well our business or marketing is doing, and I think this is unhelpful. Instead, start seeing your subscribers as people, rather than numbers on a list.
Create a newsletter format
Once you’ve started seeing your subscribers as people or readers, then you need to think about the format of your newsletter.
Much like a magazine, you need the equivalent of a hot or not section, or a news round-up, and you definitely need the big meaty features. These don’t need to look like they do in a magazine. In Mark Masters’ You Are The Media newsletter, he does a round-up of what’s in the newsletter. The human interest is the introductory take-over, and there are more human interest features in the longer read he puts in there. Plus, there is a fun, light-hearted section at the end.
In one of my favourite newsletters of all time, The Sophist, the whole newsletter is treated like a magazine, and it puts out the Rightmove Round Up of crazy and unrealistic houses for sale.
And in The Friday Club by Knowlton, they round up their best posts alongside posts from other businesses that cover the latest in marketing. The human interest is the insights we get into their lives, their business and some of their methodology. Plus, it’s very funny.
After you’ve decided on a format that you can repeat – a template makes everything easier to do – then you need to be consistent in your publishing.
Create consistency
Imagine being that teenager who drags their weekend butt down to the local newsagent only to find the magazine hasn’t been printed that week? How disappointing. Or my kid hoping to read the latest Beano and it’s not on the shelf.
Yes, there will be times when you fall off the newsletter wagon. There will be times when producing a newsletter gets shoved to the bottom of your to-do list, but really, you owe it to the people who are looking forward to reading the next thing that you send.
Can’t do weekly? Then do it fortnightly. Struggling with that? Make it a monthly commitment, and anything over and above that is a bonus.
Consistently doesn’t have to mean constantly, but it does need to be reliable.
Give it a name
Who wants to read a magazine called “The Magazine”? In my final year of university, we had to create a magazine in a group. I got put with some people who didn’t quite grasp what a niche was and why we needed one for our project. Nor did my arguments about a gap in the market land well.
In fairness, I was a cocky twenty-something and probably went in a bit gung-ho with my ideas and them being the right ones to agree on. Anyway, let’s just say that all of the personalities in the group clashed, and we couldn’t agree on anything. So we called the magazine, X. Yep. X.
What the hell does that say about who the magazine is for and what it’s about? Quite honestly, I was embarrassed at the time and still cringe now. It was an absolute shambles.
So many businesses call their newsletter “the newsletter”. They’ll say things like “sign up for our newsletter” and “the newsletter is coming this week.”
It doesn’t tell anyone what they can expect from it or what it’s about. You have to sell your newsletter in the same way you have to sell anything else.
Studio Gilmore calls their newsletter Brands and Humour. You know who it’s for (brands) and what you will get (breakdown of why humour works in content). It comes out every week. I know this because the description tells me that it does.
Freelance Writing Jobs by Sian Meades Williams is… a newsletter about freelance writing jobs. It’s so consistent that I once spent a whole day thinking it was Thursday when the newsletter dropped a day early. I now pay to get the newsletter a day early, such is its greatness.
And The Ask by Ellen Donnelly is a wonderful business magazine that also serves this coaching business.
Okay, but what about selling products?
When I go into a business that sells products, the first thing I usually do is change up the newsletter so that it stops being a catalogue and starts being a magazine. Doing this has seen a consistent increase in open rates.
Giving it a name and a reason to sign up has seen a consistent increase in sign-ups. Being clear that it is not a one-way broadcast means that people are more likely to want to read it, and if you treat them well, they will actively look forward to doing so.
In a time when our inboxes are filling up, and everyone is trying to get our attention, you cannot risk not giving this a try.
Reading newsletters should feel like opening up to new worlds and new ideas. It should be about your readers, not your products. I’m not saying don’t sell. I’m saying sell in a way that gives your readers something for their time, money and attention.
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This blog is the first of a five-parter about email marketing. You can find out how to improve your newsletter open rates here and why unsubscribes are a good thing here.