Are you looking for ways to improve the results of your company’s email newsletters? Follow the 10 tips below for better results.

1. Set Goals

Why do you have a newsletter? Is it to sell more? Is it to improve customer retention? Is it to nurture prospects until they are ready to become customers?

You need to be clear on the purpose of your newsletter and then set goals for your newsletter to help you achieve your objectives. How many sales do you want from your newsletter? How many new leads? How much do you want to improve customer retention? You are much more likely to be pleased with your newsletter performance after setting goals and working towards their achievement.

2. Have a Content Plan

A content plan is a living document that helps you map out the content you will put in your newsletter each month. A content plan is your roadmap for planning and developing the things you will present to your audience in your email newsletters. Make a content plan for the entire year. It will keep you on track and save you time in the long run. Consider developing a content plan that provides the following information:

• Content titles and descriptions
• Status of the content
• Due date and publish date
• Person responsible for content
• Target audience
• Distribution channels

You can see an example of a content plan below. It’s an excellent way of staying organized with your email newsletters.

3. Measure Results

You can’t really figure out success unless you regularly measure results. After sending each newsletter, take a look at the analytics. Record data points such as number sent, open rate, bounce rate, clicks, spam reports, list growth and forwards.

Compare the results to previous newsletters. See if things are improving. You might even want to develop graphs to help you visualize results. You can see an example below.

4. Test

Testing is the process of presenting different marketing scenarios to select the most promising for expansion. It’s the process of trying different things to find out what works best so you can sell more.

If you want to improve your newsletter, you need to test various elements. You’ll want to test things like subject lines, days and times of send, calls to actions, types of content and images.

At Right On – No Bull Marketing, we like to use a NASCAR analogy to help people understanding testing. Any good racing team tests their car before the big race. They try different tires and spoiler settings and examine the data to see what makes the car go faster.

You want to take the same approach with your email marketing. Testing helps you make the right decisions.

5. Focus on Customers

Focus on content that is relevant to your customers. Relevant content most often helps your audience solve their needs, problems and concerns. It’s NOT about you talking about your business, your awards, your people, or your latest gizmo. People will read things that will help make their lives better in some way. Always keep that in mind.

6. Segment Your Customer Lists

Segmenting is the process of grouping the people on your email list into “segments” that make logical sense for your business and its customers. You might segment your list between existing and prospective customers. It might be based on gender, age or other demographic information. It might be on ownership of different products.

By segmenting your email lists, you’ll be able to provide people will more relevant content that could cause better responses.

7. Optimize for Mobile Devices

More and more people are viewing newsletters on smartphones and other mobile devices. If you want to get these readers, you need to optimize your newsletter. Smartphones have limited screen space, so you’ll want to pay close attention to length of subject lines and text.

For instance, try to keep subject lines to fewer than 40 characters. Smartphones tend to truncate longer subject lines. Also the first 70 to 75 characters of your newsletter show up in an email preview below the subject line. You’ll want to hit your readers right off the bat with eye catching information that causes them to open the email.

8. Be Consistent With Sending

Get into the routine of regularly sending email newsletters whether it’s weekly, monthly or quarterly. It’s important to regularly send them because it keeps you top of mind with customers. Plus, they begin to expect it. Having a content plan will help you stay consistent with your sending.

9. Make Format Easier to Read

People tend to scan emails. You want to make the format of your newsletter easy to read. Create clearly defined sections in order to make it easy on readers to separate information. Use headlines and images to differentiate sections.

Additionally, you’ll want to use at least a 12-point font to make it easy on the eyes. Avoid using light text on a dark background. Studies show that this makes it difficult to read text. It’s usually better to go with a dark text on a light background.

10. Be Patient

Don’t expect the world to come to the end just because you sent a single email. You have to consistently send out emails and you have to be patient. Too often companies give up too soon because they’re not getting the results they want. Like all good things for your business, email marketing takes time and hard work. If you follow the tips in this posting and remain patient, you’ll significantly improve your chances of boosting email marketing results for your company.