For any business sending emails to customers, business partners and industry colleagues, the challenge is clear: How do you get people to open the emails?
In our work, we address the challenge by focusing on readability and relevancy. As a result, our clients’ newsletters have best-in-class “open” and “unsubscribe” rates.
As one example, an average of 41 percent of recipients open the monthly e-newsletter from the Tampa Baseball Museum at the Al Lopez House, much higher than the industry norm of 25 percent. Meanwhile, less than 1 percent of the recipients have unsubscribed from the database over the past year.
We’ve had similar success with e-newsletters for Halpern Enterprises, Ed Taylor Construction, and Ybor City Development Corp.
So how do you make an e-newsletter something your audience will find interesting? Here are three tips:
- Focus on news that can help the reader. Include some “news you can use.” The newsletter for Halpern, which owns, manages and develops retail centers, offers advice on such topics as how to use innovative thinking in finding tenants or how to effectively manage a center when your management company is based elsewhere.
- When you talk about something the company has done, make the story relevant to those in the industry. For Halpern, an item about the purchase of a retail center will include a discussion of how the deal fits into the company’s overall strategy. And for Ed Taylor Construction, the newsletter might highlight a summertime project that was completed in a short timeframe, but will also include tips for completing such a project while working around Florida’s weather.
- No one wants to hear you brag. By offering solid advice and offering interesting items about your work, it will be clear that your company is an expert in your field. So there’s no need to talk about how “great” you are.
In addition to great content, our newsletter strategies rely on knowing your database and being judicious on the frequency of contact. For example, the Tampa Baseball Museum’s database primarily contains baseball enthusiasts and supporters of Tampa heritage. The information sent to the database is focused on Tampa’s baseball heritage, and information about related events or news is limited to three times per year. Companies who respect the inboxes of their recipients have high open rates and low unsubscribe rates.