How to Write a Newsletter: 7 Quick Tips • Britt Bravo: Big Vision Coach and Copywriter

Hello Big Visionaries! Are you struggling with how to write your newsletter? Do you put it off? Even dread it?

The thing is, email newsletters are important tools. According to the Campaign Monitor article, How Effective Are Email Newsletters for Marketing a Business?, e-newsletters have a higher engagement rate than other types of digital marketing. They need to be part of how you share your Big Vision with the world.

Many of the ideas in my most recent post, How to Start a Blog, apply to how to write a newsletter. You need to:

• Know your newsletter’s why / purpose / goals.
• Understand your readers’ needs and desires.
• Generate topic ideas that will be of value to your readers and help you reach your goals.
• Create a content calendar.

Those are the basics for any content creation really.

I’ve also gathered 7 more tips from other sources to help you write your newsletter (source links are at the bottom).

#1 Grab their attention at the top. Your readers are in a hurry and have short attention spans. Make it clear right at the beginning how this email will benefit them, or they might not finish reading what you spent so much time writing.

#2 Give lots of value with just a dash of promo. Your readers don’t want to be bombarded with sales pitch after sales pitch. How boring is that? But you also need to let them know when you have a product or service to offer. Create content that is mostly educational and a little bit promotional.

#3 Write like a human. It can be easy to view your list as a bunch of people symbolized by a subscriber number. It’s also easy to write like you think a newsletter is supposed to sound. If you want to connect with your readers, talk to them like they are human, not numbers. Experiment with addressing them as “you” and including yourself in what you write by using “we” or “us.” As I suggested in How to Start a Blog, put up a few photos of your readers above your workspace to help you remember to write for them, not at them.

#4 Make your newsletter easy to scan. Many of your subscribers will be reading your newsletter on a phone or tablet. If it is made up of long blocks of text that require lots of scrolling, you might lose them. Using headlines, bullet points, and short paragraphs will help to keep their attention.

#5 Make your subject line short. It doesn’t matter how great your newsletter is if it isn’t opened. Your subject line can influence if it’s read. One researcher found that 41 characters, or 7 words is an effective subject line length. Others recommend subject lines that are a little longer (no more than 55 characters). You get the gist. Keep it concise.

#6 Test your subject lines. A simple way to do this is to view your most recent 5-10 subject lines and their open rates. Notice which are opened the most and write more like them. If you have 1,000 subscribers, or more, you can do A/B testing. That’s just a fancy term for sending two groups on your mailing list the same email, but with one change (e.g. a different subject line).

#7 Include a CTA button. A CTA (Call-to-Action) button is a marketing term for copy that asks a reader to do something (e.g. Subscribe, Join us, Learn more). When you thought about your why / purpose / goals for your newsletter, it probably involved your subscribers doing something after they read your newsletter. Make sure it’s super clear what you want them to do with a big ole CTA button that links to where you want them to click next.

I hope these tips are helpful. If you click on the source links, you’ll find even more!