Email marketing is one of the best ways to keep your prospects and customers engaged and your profits rolling in.
However, that only works if you consistently grow your email list and your subscribers are actually opening and reading your newsletters.
So what can you do to improve your newsletter and grow your readership?
How to Increase Your Newsletter Subscribers
Improve your newsletter’s content
The whole point of an email newsletter campaign is to inform your subscribers about what your brand is doing, update them on any new offers you have coming up, and, crucially, to serve them with unique and valuable content.
Accordingly, it should be a top priority to ensure that your newsletter content is both hyper-relevant and thoughtfully presented.
Write to the interests of your audience
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your newsletter is failing to consider the wants and needs of your audience.
Your emails will get ignored, deleted, or even marked as spam if your subscribers think they’re irrelevant (which will only hurt your email deliverability and ROI).
So while it may be tempting to load up your newsletter with promotional content and information about your brand, you should keep in mind that the main purpose of your newsletter is to educate and inspire, not sell. Your newsletter should consist of about 90% helpful information and 10% promotion as a general rule of thumb.
Touch on topics and link to content that you know your email subscribers care about. When deciding whether to feature a given article, video, or case study in your newsletter, ask yourself, “How will this make my readers’ lives easier? What immediate problem will it help them solve? Is this the kind of content they’d expect to receive from our brand?” If you can’t answer these questions with clarity and confidence, you might want to reconsider sending the newsletter.
Make the design compelling
An attractive and functional newsletter design improves the reading experience and gives the impression that your brand is professional and competent.
The two most important factors for your email design are clarity and consistency.
Make sure that you place your brand logo at the top of your newsletter so that readers immediately associate what they’re reading with your business.
Bear in mind that readers will usually scan emails, so you should use subheadings, bullet lists, and highlighted text to help draw their attention to important information when needed. Your copy should be snappy and to-the-point, and you should use high-quality images and illustrations to provide extra context and break up the text (just don’t go overboard!).
Optimize for mobile
Around 62% of emails are viewed on a mobile device, which means there’s a good chance your subscribers will be reading your newsletter on their smartphones or tablets.
It’s therefore imperative that you create a mobile-friendly newsletter that works well on smaller screens.
One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to use a responsive email template. These take the guesswork out of designing a responsive email, giving you peace of mind that your newsletter will look great across all devices.
Write a newsletter you’d want to read
Even though 61% of consumers prefer it when brands contact them via email versus any other channel, they still want those brands to add value to their lives.
When writing your newsletter, a good guiding principle is to create the newsletter you’d want to read if you were in your subscribers’ shoes. After all, if you wouldn’t find the newsletter worth reading, why should your audience?
One of the best ways to make your newsletter more appealing is to personalize it for each reader. Tailoring your emails to your individual subscribers makes them feel personally valued, which results in you becoming one of their main inbox highlights.
Personalization may involve something as simple as mentioning your contact’s name in the subject line – in fact, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Or it could mean sending different versions of your newsletter to different segments of your audience based on their common interests. This tactic can be highly effective, with some marketers reporting a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.
Make it easy to share
Perhaps the most effective way to grow your newsletter subscriber list is through word of mouth. After all, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and relatives – more than any kind of advertising.
In an ideal world, your existing subscribers will be so thrilled by the value they get from your newsletter that they’ll feel compelled to let their friends and colleagues in on the action too.
This is why you should make it as easy as possible for people to share your newsletter with others.
Of course, most of your readers will already know how to forward an individual newsletter email to their contacts, but you can also add email-sharing links for Twitter and Facebook directly inside your emails. You should also provide social sharing links on the landing page where new subscribers sign-up for your newsletter.
When it comes to your brand’s wider audience, there’s no use keeping your newsletter a secret. Don’t be afraid to plug it on your social media accounts or even across your website using pop-up forms. You should also consider creating high-value lead magnets with opt-in forms as a way to capture the email addresses of new leads and build your subscriber list.
Dive deeper into growing your email list
Increasing your email readership is essential because it ultimately translates into increasing your revenue.
The key to growing your newsletter subscribers is to provide relevant content that speaks to your subscribers’ individual interests, ensure that your emails are well-designed and mobile-optimized, and make it easy for subscribers to share them.
To learn more about ideas and tactics for growing your newsletter list, enroll in our free email course on List Growth Tactics.