5 tips on how to write the perfect newsletter for your shop

Newsletters are a powerful communication tool, but are often ignored and underestimated. Writing a newsletter is an opportunity to express yourself and to share more in-depth details. If you devise a coherent strategy, you can develop a long-lasting relationship with your audience and encourage them to take action. A newsletter is therefore an important tool for driving engagement and increasing website traffic!

In this article, we’ll share our 5 golden rules with you. Want to learn how to write a newsletter? Then keep reading!

1. Define your approach: Do you want to inform or sell?

Although the idea might sound tempting, your audience is unlikely to be interested in a newsletter which is primarily sales-driven. Why? Because, as the name suggests, a newsletter is meant to provide news!

Show that you are a useful source of information and an expert in your field. In this way, readers who are planning on making purchases will think of you first.

Here’s what we do at Kami Store: we ensure that every email offers added value, even when it’s a sales-driven email. Whether it focuses on sales or marketing advice, a few sentences reflecting our mission towards our community and our commitment to creating a more sustainable world add a personal touch.

2. Focus on your visual appeal

When writing a newsletter which is easy on the eye, its design is just as important as its content: a powerful form of expression, without using words! Including eye-catching and aesthetic visuals will help to illustrate and enhance your message.

It’s also important to stick to your style guide. Your audience will be able to identify you instantly if they recognise your usual graphics and colours: this will help you to stand out from your competitors and be seen as unique by your consumers.

Here’s what we do at Kami Store: we always start our newsletter with a portrait image which is relevant to the subject and includes our logo so that it’s clearly identifiable. We also develop simple, attractive and reusable templates which reflect our style guide.

3. Don't forget your CTA

Online consumers rarely take action if they aren’t encouraged to do so. That’s why it’s vital to include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your newsletter to encourage your audience to take whatever action you want.

Your CTAs must be clearly visible and strategically positioned throughout your email. This is particularly important when it comes to increasing traffic to your site or another desired destination.

To simplify the purchasing process for your customers, remember to choose the redirect link carefully.

Here’s what we do at Kami Store: depending on the subject, we often use several CTAs to structure our newsletter.

4. Only send your newsletter to your subscribers or qualified leads

If you send your newsletter to someone who doesn’t know you, there's no reason for them to open it. As a result, the opening rate of your newsletter will be lower.

Never forget that the purpose of a newsletter is to develop a relationship with your audience. As such, it’s a good idea to send your communications to people who have already expressed an interest in your brand, enabling you to maintain and further develop this relationship.

Here’s what we do at Kami Store: we use all our communication channels to encourage our community to subscribe to our newsletter (website, social media, blog posts, etc.).

5. Be responsive

Nowadays, most users check their emails on their phones. A website needs to be responsive (designed and developed to adapt to all screen sizes) and so does a newsletter! Consequently, you need to think about the position of the different elements beforehand.

Don’t worry: most email marketing platforms (e.g. MailChimp) offer a mobile preview of your newsletter. Make sure that it displays correctly on your computer and your mobile phone!

Here’s what we do at Kami Store: we test our newsletter by opening it on a smartphone before sending it to the entire database.

To make the job easier for you, here’s a checklist of things to consider before sending out your newsletter:

• Read it, double check it and triple check it. You can never be too careful!
• Send yourself a test email and view it on your mobile and your computer to make sure that it displays correctly.
• If you have several mailing lists, make sure you’ve chosen the right one.
• Have you removed the email addresses of people who have previously unsubscribed?
• Have you included the right links in your email and do they work?
• Your subject line needs to be short, punchy, intriguing. It’s very important!
• Put yourself in your audience’s shoes: is there anything in this email which might make them want to unsubscribe? If there is, then make a change: a lost subscriber is lost forever, so give them something to look forward when it comes to reading your newsletters!