How to Generate Email Newsletter Ideas for Small Businesses
Email newsletters offer the best ROI of most marketing tools and are a powerful tool for small businesses to stay connected with their customers, promote their products and services, and drive repeat sales. But to create effective email marketing newsletters and stay consistent with your marketing communication plan, you need a steady stream of engaging content ideas that your subscribers find interesting and useful.
Keeping your emails fresh and relevant means investing time and effort into crafting new content. If you are struggling to come up with new ideas for your email newsletters, try these strategies to help you generate topics:
1. Think About Your Audience First
- What are the demographics of your audience? A shared age range, gender, location, and average income level across most of your audience or similarities among different segments can help identify common interests.
Speaking of interests, what types are most frequently associated with your audience? Think about their hobbies, values, passions, and where they are most likely to spend their free time.- Help them solve a need or address a common pain point. What are the top challenges are they facing and how can your brand support them or directly provide a solution?
- Consider their place in their customer journey. Where are most of your email list subscribers in the buying process? What could they read today that will influence their buying decision later?
Speaking of interests, what types are most frequently associated with your audience?2. Showcase Your Business’s Expertise
- Share relevant happenings in your industry. Let subscribers know a little more about how recent developments, industry trends, or best practices might help them.
- Give them a few tips and tricks. Demonstrate your brand’s subject matter authority and commitment to being helpful by providing a few pieces of advice for situations that are related to your products or services.
Spotlight a case study, review, or customer success story. Leverage your happy customer experiences to build credibility and set expectations for future customers.- Show a behind-the-scenes view of your operations. By giving your email subscribers a glimpse into how your business works to serve them you’ll have a great opportunity to communicate what makes your brand unique and better than competitors.
Spotlight a case study, review, or customer success story.3. Use a Content Calendar to Stay Organized
- Plan out your content ahead of time and review it at least quarterly. When you plan your newsletter content in advance and think several months ahead, you will not only save yourself time and decisions later, you will also gain a great perspective on the types of content your audience will receive and be better able to shift around topics, themes, or promotions to keep the campaigns well balanced.
- Take a look at past email newsletter performance. For ongoing email newsletter campaigns, analyze what worked in the past and what didn’t to gain more insights on the types of content that were most effective for your audience. Pay attention to open rates as they will inform you on what subject lines were most successful as well as to click through rates, which will point out what sections of your emails get overlooked or capture attention.
Make a Great First Impression.
Getting more leads and sales from your email subscribers starts with great design. Watch this helpful video guide on small business email template design that will make your brand stand out in a crowded inbox.
4. Find New Ideas from Your Marketing Channels
- Check your social media page. What topics got the most shares and likes? Similar content could work very well for your next email newsletter.
- Explore customer feedback for themes. Are there questions that get asked of your customer service team more frequently than most? Is there a particular type of service most commented on by your customers? Incorporating more information about these subjects or directly answering top questions will be highly valuable content for your audience and shows how your company is proactively thinking about their needs.
- Show how your business is active in your community. Is your company involved in local charity, civic clubs, schools, or sports organizations? Send an update on recent activities and tell the story of why giving back to your community is important for your business.
5. Look Outside Your Organization for More Inspiration
- Follow brands that inspire you. Sign up for their email lists and follow them on social media to see what types of content they produce for their audience, how it resonates with you as part of the audience, and why.
- Browse media that your target audience likes to consume. At the intersection of what your business offers and what your potential customers read, watch, and listen to is bound to be a wealth of related content. There you will likely find great topic ideas or even fascinating stories worth sharing in your emails.
- Curate compelling content. Share interesting and informative articles from other sources related to your business with a brief introduction on why they are helpful for your readers.
Follow brands that inspire you. 6. Send an Exclusive Offer That Grabs Their Attention
- Create urgency with a limited-time deal or discount.
- Provide early access for your email subscribers to a special promotion or sale.
- Present an exclusive video link, whitepaper, guide, or list that your subscribers will find helpful and can’t get anywhere else.
7. Mix Up Email Content Formats
Experience with variety in the types of content in your newsletters. Include videos, try out a quiz or survey, or build your email around highly visual content, such as an infographic.- Don’t forget about A/B testing. Testing different subject lines, design layouts, colors, images, and calls to action buttons can yield a wealth of information about what is most enjoyable and engaging for your email subscribers.
Experience with variety in the types of content in your newsletters.Email Marketing Agency New York and Connecticut
Solutions for Growth is a 5-star rated small business email marketing agency in New York, Connecticut, and across the USA for more than a decade. We manage Klaviyo and Constant Contact email marketing programs for our clients and also offer one-on-one support to drive better engagement and measurable results from email marketing.
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Email Content FAQ
- How often should I send email newsletters? The optimal frequency depends on many things, including your business type, the content of your emails, and the expectations of your audience. Generally, we recommend to small business owners that sending newsletters at least once or even twice a month is a great starting point.
- What should be the ideal length of a newsletter? Let your audience needs and content guide the length of your emails, and remember overall that concise, highly relevant information is best. Most readers will quickly scan your newsletter, and possibly do so while they are on the go, so be sure to keep your design mobile friendly and your content to the point.
- How can I improve my email newsletter open rates?
Compelling subject lines are essential: A/B testing subject lines is an excellent way to improve open rates. Always be sure to write catchy subject lines that make your reader stop and take action. A good rule of thumb is 2/2/2: readers will take 2 seconds to see who the email is from, 2 seconds to gauge what it is about, and 2 seconds to decide if they are interested before they either click to open or move on. - Optimize your email template for mobile users: If your email newsletters are hard to read on mobile devices, you’ll be undercutting your email marketing efforts every time. Use a strong color contrast, large font size, images, headlines, and small paragraphs of text to keep your newsletters easy to read for mobile device users.
- Personalize your subject lines or the body of your emails: Tailoring your email messages to match the interests of your subscribers means they are more likely to continue to find value in your newsletters and choose to open future emails from your brand. They are also much more likely to continue through their conversion journey on their path to purchase from your business.
- What should I do if my subscribers unsubscribe? Take a look at the reasons why subscribers removed themselves from your email list and analyze what changes might need to be made to your content or frequency schedule.
- How can I measure the success of my email newsletter campaigns? Putting together key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and conversions will build a picture of how well your email marketing campaigns are working now and where they can be improved. Use this guide for email metrics that matter to better understand how to view the performance of your campaigns.
Compelling subject lines are essential:By following these techniques, testing different approaches, and keeping your target audience at the center of your content plan, you will be able to generate a steady stream of engaging content ideas. Staying engaged with your prospects and past customers through your email newsletters will help you build stronger relationships and drive sustainable, ROI-positive business growth.
Full Service Email Marketing Agency for Small Businesses
From newsletter design and content generation to campaign management and analysis, we offer a full service email marketing program tailored to the needs of small businesses. Contact us to learn more about how we can help your business grow with email marketing.
Set the Right Goals for Your Email Marketing
Learn how to achieve long term business growth and stronger customer retention in this video series on the 5 steps to email marketing success. .