Crafting the Perfect End-of-Year Newsletter
Your goal is to continue reaching new clients. Your business life may depend on keeping that client pipeline trudging along without any slowdown in production.
To help you in the endeavour, you may constantly communicate with your clients with a cornucopia of options. Use social media's shareable content to share exciting information with your audience briefly.
Sometimes you want to interact directly with your clients: enter the email newsletter. The email newsletter is ideal for you to share critical end-of-year messages with your clients.
Most people get inundated with a deluge of emails. So it would be best if you crafted the perfect end-of-year newsletter to cut through the flotsam and jetsam lingering in your audience's inbox.
We offer the following guidelines for crafting the perfect end-of-year newsletter.
Engage your audience by making it about them
You'll want to deliver targeted content to your audience that matters to them. Make sure your newsletter is something they can skip, scan, and quickly find value in.
Know why you're sending the newsletter
Ensure you are keenly aware of your motivation for sending an end-of-year newsletter. Your clients are busy and have stuffed inboxes, just like you. You may have a great relationship, but they couldn't care less about superfluous information about you.
Make your objectives clear and present and explain how they are relevant to your content consumers.
Keep it simple
You know who is reading the newsletter and why you're sending one. Now, you want to keep the content incredibly simple for your audience. Your newsletter is one of many messages in your client's inbox; it may get disregarded if it's difficult to read. Please keep it simple.
Here's the thing, though – over 60% of your clients are opening emails on their phones. If your newsletter looks rubbish on mobile, you're basically throwing your effort down the drain.
Make sure you're using a single-column layout and buttons that are easy to tap with a thumb. Your text needs to be readable without squinting, and images should resize properly.
Right, because there's nothing worse than trying to read a newsletter that looks like it was designed for a desktop from 2005.
Command attention with compelling subject lines
You want to get the content read. To get your newsletter opened, you've got to titillate your audience with a sizzling subject line. It needs to be something that draws their eyes and then encourages them to open your newsletter.
Make sure your subject line demonstrates the value and oozes personality to stand out far from the madding crowd.
Although someone may subscribe to your emails, that doesn't mean they will open the email once it's in their inbox. A method that some marketers use to try and increase familiarity with their subscribers is by changing up the subject line each day, week, or month.
But eventually, your subscribers will get tired of those mundane subject lines. Why? Because of the lack of incentive to click on that email immediately. A more effective approach would be to have a unique and engaging subject line for each newsletter.
Look, timing matters more than you think. Tuesday through Thursday between 10 AM and 2 PM typically see the highest open rates.
Don't send your end-of-year newsletter during the week between Christmas and New Year's – everyone's either stuffed with turkey or pretending to work. You'll get better results sending it the first week of December when people are still checking their emails properly.
Pick A Single Call to Action
A newsletter is typically composed of multiple pieces of content with different calls to action. Even though you have more than one CTA, that doesn't mean they should all share the same level of importance.
If you want your subscribers to take action, only include one primary CTA. The rest of the CTAs should be “secondary options.” For example, they may click through to read a blog post or forward the email to someone else. By making it easier for them to understand what you want from them, they are more likely to comply.
You need to track what's actually working. Open rates should hit 21-25% for business newsletters, whilst click-through rates typically sit around 2-3%.
If your unsubscribe rate goes above 0.5%, something's gone wrong. Bounce rates tell you if your list needs cleaning – keep an eye on these numbers to see if your newsletter is actually doing its job.
Email deliverability best practices
Your newsletter won't matter if it ends up in the spam folder. Set up your authentication protocols properly – SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records aren't just techie nonsense, they're what keep your emails out of the digital bin.
Keep your subscriber list clean by removing bounced emails regularly. Use a consistent sending domain – don't switch between different email addresses or your reputation takes a hit.
Avoid spam trigger words like “free,” “urgent,” or “limited time offer” in your subject lines.
Start en media res
En media res is a Latin term for “in the midst of things.” It's also a storytelling technique that thrusts the reader right into the action. Start your client at the climax of your story, hook them, and draw them into your end-of-year newsletter.
Once you've got them interested, you can unfold your entire story and finish with a solid call to action.
Know the difference between year's, years', and years
As we get near the end of the year, it's essential to know the difference between “year's, years', and years.” It'll inspire confidence in your audience.
Year's indicates possession when the unit of time is singular.
- You were this year's top salesperson.
Years' indicates possession when the unit of time is plural.
- She will earn her degree in four years' time.
- The apostrophe is used because “years” modifies the noun “time.”
Year's and Years' express compound time
- As part of her contract, she received one year's tuition reimbursement.
- As a bonus, Clark Griswold received two years' membership in the “Jelly of the Month Club.”
Years is the plural of the word “year.”
- It's been years since I've seen her.
