Email Newsletters: 15 Things Not To Do

Email Newsletters: What Not To Do

Your email newsletter is a consistent, vital email contact point with your core audience. It’s a brand update and newspaper, a relationship builder and new business tool. So it’s important to get it right. Here are some things we’ve seen folks getting wrong.

1. Don’t Be Boring

Be informative: provide useful, timely information.
Be personal: personalize content and address your audience in a way they recognize.
Be personable: be nice but not cheesy, friendly but not presumptuous.

2. Don’t Design for Desktop Only

Be responsive: use responsive design.
Or at least be mobile-friendly: make sure your email renders well on mobile devices.

3. Don’t Be Repetitive

Repetition breeds insanity, as the poet said. Each article or section needs to say something new. Each newsletter needs to be different than the one before it.

3b. Don’t Be Repetitive

You see? Repetition is not good.

4. Don’t Be Selfish

Offer something of value to your reader, instead of simply asking them for something.

5. Don’t Be Disrespectful

Respect your reader. Prove that you respect them by giving them value, something of value, so that they read rather than delete, click instead of unsubscribe.

6. Don’t Forget the Preheader

The preheader or snippet is the first thing a lot of readers wills see, so don’t waste that valuable real estate.
Most email clients automatically display the first text line of the email in the message preview (typically 40-100 characters).

7. Don’t Use a Table of Contents

Readers scan, so unless your email is really long just design a clear easily scanable email so that readers can scroll through it. And if your email is really long, ask yourself why — and make sure there’s a really good reason.
Build headlines that display the contents not a table of contents.

8. Don’t Be Longwinded

Keep it brief . The average email open time is 20 seconds or less (MarketinSherpa). Users read for 51 seconds when they are interested, and they read for shorter periods on mobile devices (Nielsen Norman Group).
Be clear about what you want, or the news you are sharing.

9. Don’t Be Confusing

Don’t blur the line between editorial and advertising, follow social links and share social links.
Keep the writing clear and concise, and use line breaks, links, bold, headers to ensure easy scanning and reading.

10. Don’t Use Generic Images or No Images

Keep your newsletter visually interesting.

11. Don’t Be Boring

Don’t use dull or generic or same every time subject line.
Don’t be glum or wordy. Talk to people the way you would if you were having a conversation.

12. Don’t Ignore the Metrics

You have real-time insight into what your readers like, what they dislike, how many opens, how many clicks. Use it or lose it.

13. Don’t Forget to Test and Proofread

It can get tedious, but you need to check every link, proofread every sentence, check all the spelling. Nothing says unprofessional like a broken link or misspelled word.
You can test how the email renders across multiple email clients by using Litmus or other third-party software.