If you’re a small-business owner or a busy marketing manager in a medium-sized enterprise, email newsletter creation can be a daunting prospect, especially since you’ll need to fit the collation of articles, features, and stories, the laying-out of the content, and the distribution of completed newsletters somewhere into a work schedule that’s already tough to maintain. Under challenging conditions like these, it’s all too easy to make mistakes, perhaps just because you’ve no time to gain an understanding of what makes a winning email newsletter.

 

Avoid These 4 Email Newsletter Mistakes

 

To help ensure your email newsletters aren’t consigned to the trash folder in a heartbeat, we’ve listed a few of the mistakes which can result in a less-than-lukewarm response to your publishing efforts. If you can avoid these errors, you’ll be the publisher of a marketing vehicle more likely to win than wind up in the bin.

 

1. Clutter and Disarray:

 

Try to stick to a single topic for your email newsletter. It may be tempting to try and support all aspects of your business within a single email, but in all likelihood, the result will be a newsletter that’s cluttered and has no discernible focus. It’s better to create content relating to a single business vertical if you can.

 

2. Sales Mail:

 

Today’s consumers are typically jaded by the never-ending influx of sales mail to their inboxes. If your email newsletter is too “salesy”, it’s probably going to be ignored by many of your prospects, leads, and customers. Try to work with a content formula comprising 90% useful information that will engage and educate your readers, and 10% promotional content, just to catch those ready to respond to a sales call-to-action.

 

3. Lukewarm Subject Lines:

 

Many marketing professionals make the mistake of using standard subject lines for email newsletters, with the same subject line being used time after time. In reality, though, readers are more likely to open your newsletters if each one has a different, attention-grabbing subject line. Make the effort to come up with a fresh, creative, and engaging subject line for each email newsletter you release. That’s a sure way to get your newsletters opened more often.

 

4. Competing Calls-to-Action:

 

This is another mistake which can easily be made in your eagerness to drive sales by email. If you have too many prominent calls-to-action in your email newsletter, the whole thing can look too busy and confusing. Instead, try to include just one stand-out CTA, which clearly states what you want your readers to do. By all means include some secondary CTAs, but don’t make them compete with the main one for your readers’ attention.

 

How to Ease the Task of Email Newsletter Creation

 

If you can avoid the four mistakes listed in this post, you’ll be on your way to creating email newsletters that capture attention and beg to be read. As mentioned at the start of this post though, creating, publishing, and distributing email newsletters can be a time-consuming process. Instead of struggling to squeeze the necessary tasks onto an already lengthy to-do list, you could enlist the help of a virtual assistant to take responsibility for your email newsletters. Some VAs and VA providers even specialise in marketing support, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find a skilled assistant to create and distribute newsletters for you. If time and resource constraints prevent you from giving your newsletters sufficient attention, outsourcing a virtual assistant might be the perfect solution. There’s only one way to find out though, so why not give it a try?