How to Craft an Engaging Email Newsletter and Measure Success

Staying top-of-mind with prospects and customers is a challenge all engineering companies face. Email newsletters are a great way to maintain a conversation with your customers, promote valuable content, and help nurture your leads. When done right, a corporate email newsletter can be one of the most effective and strategic marketing activities a company undertakes.

However, email newsletters that aren’t executed according to proven best practices often turn out to be a liability, causing valuable leads to dry up, or worse yet, anger potential customers. Some of the biggest email newsletter mistakes a business should avoid include:

• Sporadic, inconsistent e-newsletter timing
• Mailing to a purchased list or unsolicited e-mail recipients
• Poorly-programmed e-newsletter design and layout that displays incorrectly in various email programs
• Too much content in the email
• Unappealing subject line
• Lack of subscriber management/opt out capabilities
• Lack of analysis of open rates, click-through rates

In this blog post, we'll help you avoid email newsletter missteps that result in unhappy customers and prospects, and harness the power of email for your lead nurturing efforts.

Email Newsletter Best Practices to Stand Out in the Inbox

Create a Solid Foundation with Email Design

Your first step in starting an email newsletter is design. After all, this is prime real estate for your company and brand and serves as a key tool to communicate who your company is and how your products and services can help readers. 

The design should be consistent and easy for readers to skim for content that's compelling to them.

As an example, our client, Genuen, includes large, easy-to-read headlines, compelling and relevant content, and a prominent call-to-action button.

Ensuring the design is correctly programmed in email engine software is equally critical for display in numerous different email clients. Unfortunately, each popular email client in the market today – Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. – displays images, columns, and other design elements a little differently. Outlook is especially picky and requires specific programming techniques for your email newsletter to display correctly to your recipients.

With poor design and/or programming, you may find that what was once a beautiful email newsletter in the conceptual planning stage has turned into a mess of misaligned columns, images and text once your readers open it up.

Test your design at emailonacid.com – a web service that, for a small fee, will run the design code through a tool that mimics all popular email clients, ensuring that you discover any issues with your layout up front, so you can fix them before mailing out to your audience.

Develop Compelling Content

It’s tempting to focus your email newsletter content on sales-driven topics such as new promotions. You will better attract and retain readers if you minimize the sales pitch, and focus instead on creating and offering content that helps readers do their job better.

Here are 5 types of content we have found to be the most valuable for a technical audience, driving click-throughs and keeping readers coming back for more:

1. Industry trends
2. Tutorials or “tips and tricks” that help readers use your products more effectively
3. Case studies from customers doing something unique and compelling with your products
4. A “Top 5” list – such as questions new customers ask, with answers, or new applications for your flagship product. It may sound gimmicky, but a Top 5 list blends valuable content packaged in an appealing format– people love lists!
5. Event news or snippets from presentations you’ve recently given at industry conferences

People have short attention spans, so consider how much content you put in and remember, the shorter the better. Provide a compelling headline, a brief summary of an article, an image, and a prominent link to read more.

Executing these best practices will help your readers skim quickly to find what they want to read, and it helps you push visitors to your website, where you can offer even more valuable content to your audience.

Grow Your Mailing List and Boost Readership

Once you’ve designed your email newsletter and have a clear vision for succinct, compelling content, it’s time to build your readership. While it’s tempting to mail every contact in your database and more, there is a smarter approach that will gain you more loyalty and better results.

Focus on only your most relevant leads – those who have contacted you in the last 12 – 24 months. Older leads are less likely to remember you or be interested in your newsletter. In addition, older leads commonly include invalid or outdated email addresses, and your email newsletter will like have a higher bounce rate.

Also, to adhere to privacy laws, there are several key points you should keep in mind when building your contact list:

• Never use a purchased list. This is considered unsolicited email, and an email newsletter should only be sent to contacts who know your company and have engaged with you in the past.
• Only send to individuals, not a group inbox used by multiple people. For example, an email address such as info@msn.com or sales@ibm.com should be removed from your list of contacts.
• Always offer the opportunity to unsubscribe or update email preferences at the bottom of your email.
• Don’t forget to offer a prominent “subscribe” link on your website. People who have willingly subscribed are some of your most valuable readers, and they are highly motivated to receive your emails.

Following these rules isn’t just best practice; it also improves the chance that your email newsletter is not flagged as spam. In addition, sending to only your most relevant and valuable leads improves your ROI with higher open rates and click-through rates. In the end, these are the metrics that will provide visibility into its impact on your business and foster an ongoing dialogue with your target audience.

Maximize the Impact of Email Newsletters with Data-Driven Metrics

Now that you understand basic best practices, let’s cover strategies for measuring success after you hit “send." The key metrics for an e-newsletter include:

• Bounce rate: the percentage of recipients whose email addresses are invalid and did not receive your mailing.
• Open rate: the percentage of recipients who opened your e-mail.
• Click-through rate: the percentage of recipients who clicked-through on a link in the e-newsletter.
  • NOTE: a high click-through rate is the ultimate measure of success.
• Opt-out rate: The percentage of contacts who unsubscribed.

Tracking these key statistics gives you visibility into the success of your e-newsletter campaign and provides opportunities for ongoing improvement. Below, we’ll look at an analysis of open rates and click throughs for your e-newsletter, as these two metrics provide the clearest view of how your readership is using your e-news. Bounce rates and opt outs are much more influenced by the quality of your distribution list. 

How to Improve Email Open Rate

According to a report produced by Statista, some 320 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2021. With the level of noise that we all deal with in our email inbox, how do you get someone to open an email newsletter that you’ve sent for the first time?

The quality of your recipient list plays a role, but there is another key factor that is critical to improving your open rate: the subject line.

An effective subject line will entice your audience, and motivate them to open your email. A subject line that is too general, such as “XYZ Company Email Newsletter” will fall short – it doesn’t invite the user with an action, nor does it provide a window into the content inside your e-newsletter. Conversely, a very long subject line with too much detail can also fail you – not only because you are making your recipients work more as they skim their many emails, but also because many email programs will cut off your subject line if it’s more than about 60 characters.

Instead, focus on a subject line that is actionable, brief, and highlights key content in your e-newsletter. 

In a past email newsletter, TREW Marketing worked with Wineman Tech News (now Genuen) to develop this successful headline focused on an exciting new product they had just released:

Wineman Tech News - Test Cell Control Made Simpler with RAPID

The subject line not only mentioned the new product – RAPID – it also gave specifics on the product benefits that the target audience would be interested in – making test cell control simpler.

The open rate for the email newsletter was very strong, exceeding the industry average by almost 30%. In addition, the article about RAPID was the most popular item in the e-newsletter, garnering more than 20 percent of all click-throughs even though it wasn’t situated at the top of the email. Clearly, recipients were highly motivated by the subject line, opened the email, skimmed it, and many continued to learn more about the RAPID product, all thanks to an effective subject line.

How to Improve Email Click-Through Rate

Getting your recipients to open your e-newsletter is only half the battle. The second piece of the puzzle is the click-through rate.

Great newsletter design and compelling content play a key role in improving your click-through rate. Here are some additional key points for improving this valuable metric:

• Write brief, compelling headlines for each article
• Provide a 1-2 sentence summary for each article with a prominent link to read more
• Ensure your most valuable articles are placed near the top of your newsletter
• Use your sidebar to highlight additional items from your website that your readers may not have seen
• Finally, ensure that the content mentioned in your email subject line is easy to locate and click on as soon as the newsletter is opened

In Genuen's case, the company garnered click-through rates more than double the industry average – an exceptional number for their first email newsletter.

Addressing Email Frequency

It’s worth mentioning that your email newsletter frequency rate can also affect these statistics. If your newsletter distribution is infrequent or sporadic, readers are less likely to engage with you. People crave predictability as much in the electronic world as in print. A monthly email newsletter, for example, becomes something your readers can expect in their in-box at the same time each month. Quarterly newsletters are also a popular choice. The key is to select a frequency that you have the ability to consistently deliver on, and set expectations with your readership.

Overall, smart analysis and an openness to change when results aren’t what you expected are the keys to continuous improvement and refinement of your email strategy. Ultimately, email can help you build a positive, ongoing dialogue with your key prospects and customers.

To learn more about creating compelling content to include in your email newsletters, download our guide to content marketing below. 

TREW is a marketing agency dedicated to reaching engineering and technical audiences through a range of marketing initiatives. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer.