Does your business have an email newsletter? If not, it’s something you should seriously consider — and even if you already send out a regular newsletter, you may want to rethink how you do things and analyze whether you’re making the most creative emails possible. Let’s break down why you need an email newsletter and go through some tips to help yours stand out from the crowd.
Why do I need an email newsletter?
Do you really need an email newsletter? The answer is yes — newsletters have huge potential. They provide value to your customers and offer a way to connect; newsletters also boost social media traffic and web traffic, and they can drive sales. Best of all, launching an email newsletter is fairly easy, with no big costs associated with getting off the ground.Your overall newsletter strategy should include clearly-defined goals of what, exactly, you want your newsletter to achieve. Define your audience, too, segmenting them into groups such as subscribers, leads, trial users, customers and past customers. Figure out your brand image and be prepared to do A/B testing as you consider what works best.If you already recognize that email is an important method of marketing your business, you probably make an effort to regularly send out email newsletters and email series to your subscribers. But does it ever feel as if you’re shouting into the void? People get hundreds of emails each day. To help make yours really pop, you need one thing: creativity. Let’s discuss how you can write a creative email that stands head and shoulders above the crowd.
#1. Find a creative topic
Build a strong foundation by making your newsletter topic itself be creative; that way, it will be easier for every other aspect of the newsletter to tie back into the creative theme. One example is Inside Wine, a newsletter that provides the most up-to-date news from the wine industry. Not only is this topic creative, but it’s also niched down, which equals more engagement. Not everybody wants to read about wine made from blueberries, but the people who do want to really do. Come up with a creative newsletter topic that people want to read about; from there, fanning that creative spark into a flame will be a breeze.Subject line: Blueberry wine / Post 2017 wine industry / Canned wine questioned / Follow Friday
#2. Craft a surprising subject line
Get creative with your subject lines by utilizing the element of surprise. What sort of subject line would your followers likely expect to get from you? Do the exact opposite. A recent email from The School Of Life turned heads with a perplexing subject line that read, “The hard work of being ‘lazy.’” The phrase certainly peaked our interest, and it does a great job of enticing readers to click. A big part of creativity is surprise — doing something fresh that people have never seen before. By writing email subject lines that surprise people, your creative email can get more opens.Subject line: The hard work of being ‘lazy’
#3. Include artwork
One creative design element you can include in your emails is artwork — not photographs, not graphic design images, but illustrations. Take a look at this email marketing example from Alice and Olivia, a company that includes a cute doodle of a woman’s face in their welcome email to new subscribers. The drawing has a messy bun, chic sunglasses, and red lips — very on-brand for this designer clothing company. Incorporating some art into your newsletter layout can help you make a more creative email by doing something fresh.Subject line: Welcome to Alice + Olivia
#4. Change the sender name
To get a better open rate, send your emails using a creative name instead of just your company name. If your business name is interesting and eye-catching on its own (for instance, King Arthur Flour), you might not need to switch things up. But otherwise, get creative and think about what you could use for a sender name. Whatever you do, change the sender name to something besides just an email address — an email address is impersonal and hard to recognize. Think about the difference between “Amazon’s Deals of the Day” (which also opens up more space in your subject line) and “noreply@amazon.com;” the former is more descriptive and personal, and also more likely to be opened.Subject line: Free shipping on Zojirushi Bread Machines
Wrap-up: Send more creative newsletters
Not sure where to begin? BEE’s stunning email templates can help kick-start your creativity and put you on the road to making a creative email that gets people to open and respond. The ready-made templates, each designed for a different type of email newsletter, can help you decide on the best newsletter layout and make the best HTML emails to be sent out to your customers.
