Newsletters and their hidden potential
November 2023
Lotte – PR and Communications Manager, joined a newsletter training course this month to get new information to optimize newsletters we send to our travel agents and media.
Opinions are divided on the newsletter genre, but when it’s done right, it has huge potential.
The course was a real eye-opener on how this often routine category of a tool can be used far more effectively when you know the basic rules of thumb.
Two experts in the field, Rasmus Nordstrøm, independent content partner and copywriter, and Mette Hertzmann, partner and owner of Symbiotisk, each shared their valuable insights during the course.
Lotte came home with renewed knowledge and inspiration, some of the most important things in her opinion which we will share with our customers:
☝ Know your target audience and focus on their needs when writing your newsletter objectives.
☝ Just because you’re writing professionally doesn’t mean you have to be boring – we’re people with humor at work too, and a text is easier to read when it’s a bit playful.
☝The text is most important – it’s the heart of the newsletter – but also make the design eye-pleasing and easy to read.
☝CTAs are important, but less is more in the newsletter genre. One of the experts from the course even believes that the equation should be 1 newsletter = 1 CTA.
☝ Make it personal – but respect your audience’s boundaries. Too much click-bait in the title makes the reader feel cheated, and no one likes that.
☝ Create a strategy with your newsletter and always check back to see if you’re fulfilling your intent.
Not all of these are easy to achieve in an organization where you have a lot of customers or products and need CTAs for all – but the intent, that it feels genuinely interesting and relevant to the reader, needs to be there.
Preferably, the introduction describes a problem and how you can approach a solution to it. You can do this already in the title, by using the structure ‘pain – agitation – solution’.
Pain- Point out the problem, Agitation – explain why the problem is so terrible and solution – explain that by reading the newsletter there might be a solution to find.
Simple but effective.
And as a bonus, you already know a lot more about the reader than you do when writing an article or advert copy.
In the travel sector, we write newsletters both for the travel agents and for travel media and journalists. Thus, our aim is not necessarily to sell anything directly, but rather to sell the idea of a destination or a product as the perfect escape to dull Scandinavian weather, for example. Thus, the Pain- Agitation- Solution model actually works well, also in B2B newsletters.
And when you realize the potential power of the newsletter, it’s well worth putting the extra effort into writing it.
Newsletter recipients have signed up to receive the newsletter themselves, so the interest is already there. You don’t have to captivate the reader in the same way as in other genres. This is exactly what makes the genre such a potentially great communication tool.
Lotte immediately started this month’s newsletter with renewed energy and is already looking forward to creating more newsletters for our clients!
The new tools in her toolbox need to be put to the test.
