Do you write newsletters? Terrific, but you should know that the estimated 71 million e-mail addresses in the world receive about 1 billion messages each day, among which your newsletters.[1]
It’s easy to see the problem: how to stand out from the crowd? How can you increase the rate at which people open your e-mails?

Although social networks and messaging services seem to be expanding at the speed of light, they haven’t touched the role of e-mails, and that’s why writing a newsletter that is interesting, stimulating and influences behavior is of fundamental importance.

Keep in mind that every day about 240 million commercial message mails are sent, about 7 for every registered user.
The kinds of newsletters we mostly receive concern promotions, discounts, travel and tourism. The numbers of mails from social networks are also increasing (35%), as are newsletters about technology/Apps (31%) and those concerning job offers (30.4%).1
There’s a sex-based difference in the area of Direct Email Marketing (DEM) as well; women are mostly interested in discounts, fashion, health and beauty, while men prefer to receive news about technology, sports, cars, bills and home utilities.
That’s why writing an effective newsletter, targeted properly and with relevant content, will let us give a positive answer to the question, “will s/he open it?”

Before we move on to the 5 tips for writing an effective newsletter, it is important to have one thing clearly in mind: “why write a newsletter?”
Basically, there are three reasons: the need to inform and update, for example, like newsletters linked to newspapers or news websites (35% of users), reminders of important dates, likes deadlines for bills and other payments (20.4%) and interest in contents like discounts and promotions (18.4%).[1]

Now that we have a clearer picture of the world of DEM, we can move on to the 5 tips for an effective newsletter:

  1. Analyze your target audience: an accurate understanding of your audience is of fundamental importance; collect demographics, interests, uses and all the other information you can get. Once you have analyzed it thoroughly, you will have a much sharper picture of the people who are receiving your mails.
  2. Try to subdivide your newsletter into several sections; people mostly look for information, so try to examine different topics, with some correlation, perhaps divided into sections.
  3. Follow the five Ws rule (who, what, how, when, why). Providing an answer to these 5 questions is certainly a point in your favor.
    “A little hint: balance your content between information (90%) and promotions (10%)”.
  4. The content of your newsletter must be precise and detailed, written in dry and simple language. If you quote data from a study or an article, always cite your source.
  5. The style must be, above all, clear and uniform; don’t ramble on and don’t use sentences that are overly complex. Newsletters are almost always read quickly, so deliver the most important information at the start and give it some impact; in this sense, pay attention to the headlines/titles and the images, because these are the main elements that determine whether the newsletter will be read or not.
    “Always keep in mind that the factors that make your newsletter worth opening are clarity of content (47% of users), low frequency (32.5%) and relevance to the receiver (31%).”

Accomplishing all this on your own can be difficult. It’s advisable to rely on assistance from experts, who will provide support from the creation of the website or landing page, using tools like Landing Pages Manager; to which they will also contribute their marketing expertise, designed to help you reach your objectives.
Don’t wait! Act now, contact us!

[1] Email Marketing Experience Report 2016,″ conducted by MagNews in collaboration with the Human Highway institute.