One of our not-for-profit clients has a team who care… like really care, about the work they do. So when it came time to write their monthly newsletter, the instinct was to put it all in. Every program update, every event, every thank you. If it mattered to the team, it went in the email.
The result was a newsletter that took hours to put together but was also really long. And as the data told us, it was too long.
Their click-through rate (that’s the percentage of people who click a link in your email – a decent measure of what’s actually landing) started strong at 11% up the top of the email. But by the bottom of the email, it had dropped to 0.2%. In fact, some emails got so long they were being cut off by Gmail before they even finished.
And hardly anyone was making it from the email to the website. All that effort, and the place it was supposed to send people never got the traffic.
Here’s the thing about a newsletter: it’s not supposed to be the whole story. Its job is to get someone interested enough to go looking for it. It’s kind of like a movie trailer – it doesn’t show you the whole film. Two minutes, the best bits, just enough to pique your interest, get you off the couch and into a seat. Nobody walks out of a trailer feeling like they’ve seen the movie. If it’s their kind of movie, they are left wanting more and turning interest into action. That’s the point of a great trailer, and it’s also the point of great marketing.
So we turned the newsletter into a ‘series of trailers’. A few lines on each update, then a link through to the full story on the website. Less to read in the inbox, more to discover once they clicked. And it worked – this simple tweak saw traffic to their website go from a trickle to a stream, resulting in a record attendance at their most recent event.
More traffic to your website means more people spending time with your business, not just skimming past you in their inbox. It’s also better for your search rankings (the more traffic you get, the more that search engines love you), which also helps the next right person to find your business when they’re looking for someone like you.
And this style of email has another great benefit – when everything’s crammed into one email, you’re guessing at what actually resonated. But when people have to click to keep reading, you can measure those clicks, and you know exactly what they cared about. It’s great market research, and helps you tune into what you audience wants, and hone your future marketing efforts.
A simple email newsletter isn’t just easier for your team to create. It’s also easier for your audience to read, act on, and it respects the one thing every single person on that list doesn’t have enough of: time.
You don’t need to tell the whole story in the newsletter. You just need to tell enough of it that people want to click through to your website and see how it ends.
Saying less often creates more!