Used properly, an email newsletter can be an effective marketing tool. Whether it’s plain text or html or you do it yourself or use a UK copywriter making a newsletter work for you is all in the planning and preparation.

1.    Check your facts

If your email newsletter has technical information that your customers are going to be familiar with, make sure you get your facts right. Nothing shouts ‘amateur’ more than the wrong information paraded as ‘fact’. If in doubt, speak to someone in your organisation that, while they may not be a copywriter, does have the technical know-how to double check any factual information you may include.

2.    Grab their attention from the outset

Your opening statement should get the attention of your target audience. Make it relevant to them – think about what you would like to read as a customer and then adapt your style to make that opening statement something that will hook them in and get them to read the whole newsletter.

3.    Call to action

The call to action is vital in any commercial copywriting exercise, whether that’s a newsletter or an email. You don’t just want your customer to read the newsletter and then file it away – you want to garner a positive and active response, preferably resulting in a sale.

4.    Keep it short and sweet

Newsletters should be punchy, short and to the point. If your customer wants more details, then a call to action is the best way to initiate direct contact. Newsletters are the hors d’oeuvres of commercial copywriting. They’re the appetiser that draws the customer in and gets them to sample the main course – your product or service.

5.    Spell check

Nothing puts off a customer more than a newsletter peppered with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and poor sentence construction. Although the spellchecker on your computer should catch most errors, don’t rely on it (particularly for grammatical errors) and before you send your newsletter out, make sure that it’s professional, well written and grammatically correct.

So keep it simple, keep it accurate (both factually and grammatically) and make sure you finish with a strong call to action that motivates your customer to respond.

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