Newsletters… Have you seen the big change in them?
Newsletters… have you caught onto the big change in them?
I’ve noticed a big change in newsletters over the last year. I like it.
What change you may be asking?
The biggest change is that they are getting easier to read because they have less images.
At one time you couldn’t send a newsletter without loading it with pictures to entice people to read it. Now it appears that images are on the way out.
Why?
It could be that roughly 90 per cent of people read their email on a mobile device. Images slow that down and eat data.
It could be that people want real information and a real story instead of glitz and glam.
It could be the fact that more and more newsletters are ending up as in the spam bucket because mail servers don’t trust them.
As a writer and newsletter producer I like this change. I used to spend hours laying out images in newsletters and then testing the newsletter before sending it. Some clients wanted more images than content which made them hard to produce and very time consuming.
How will this change affect newsletters?
After careful consideration I can see two improvements to newsletters because of this change.
- Headlines will get better.
- Content will get better.
A good headline or title grabs your interest and makes you want to read more but a great headline or title won’t make up for lousy content.
Two of my favourite newsletters are text only. No images, great headlines, very few links and well written about things I am interested in. I did an experiment with a newsletter I read every week. It only takes me a few minutes to read and it always makes me think I copied it into a word document and counted the number of words. I was surprised to see that it had over 1000 words in it. The word count did not include the disclaimer, the contact info or the author’s bio.
So to play on an irritating television commercial “What’s in your newsletter?”
Until next time,
Dan
(p.s. Have you ever thought of how a well written newsletter could help you earn referrals, grow your business and strengthen relationships?)