Best Practices for Email Newsletters

Email newsletter best practices pay off in many ways.

These may include growing your audience, building your authority and reputation, and of course, making money. You should have a fun and positive experience for yourself as well.

To accomplish all this and more, you’ll want to optimize everything you do in your newsletter. Here are ten best practices for email newsletters to help you achieve all your goals.

Email Newsletter Best Practices

#1: Get it delivered

Your newsletter is worthless if it doesn't get into your subscribers’ inboxes.

There are a lot of simple things you can do to make your newsletter more deliverable. For example, make sure your email isn’t stuffed with excessive links or words that will get it classified as spam.

Likewise, you should send your email from a domain name (not just Gmail or Yahoo). Most importantly, use an email service that has its own best practices in place to enhance the reputation of your newsletter.

Follow these other email best practices to get your newsletter delivered.

#2: Get it Read

Just as important as deliverability, your email newsletter best practices have to include tactics to get your email opened and read.

The day and time you send your email can increase the chances your readers will see and open it. For example, don’t send a business-related email on a Friday afternoon.

There’s a lot of research on the best days to send your email newsletter. Here are a few main points to consider, along with a few other tips on getting people to read your email.

#3: Your eNewsletter Best Practices Must Include Making Your Newsletter Engaging

One of the most important things you can do is to publish an email newsletter that your recipients want to read.

Pay attention to the subjects that interest your readers, the questions and problems they have, and other content that they want.

Using polls and other tools to get feedback from your readers is one of the best ways to make sure your content is engaging. In fact, the polls and questions you ask can increase engagement on their own.

#4: Get Referrals

One of the best ways to reach a thousand, ten thousand, or a million subscribers is to get your readers to refer your newsletter to other readers. Not only will this grow your list, but subscribers who join from a referral are more likely to open and read your email.

Obviously, you should write a newsletter that’s worth sharing and include a simple link to make this easy. But to really turn on the gas, offer incentives.

You should have a system in place to offer incentives that your readers genuinely want, and to quickly deliver the incentives. Then, explicitly notify and remind your readers about your referral incentives.

One beehiiv user set up an incentive program and got 350 referrals on their first send.

#5: Be Intentional About Getting Paid

Whether you’re charging a subscription, promoting your own products and services, or selling as an affiliate, there are several ways to generate revenue using your newsletter.

Always keep revenue in mind as you're planning your email newsletter. If you have a paid subscription, make sure you promote this regularly and offer original content your readers won’t find anywhere else.

If you’re selling your own products or those of an affiliate, blend a clear and unmissable money-making call to action into your content.

#6: Do A/B tests

Split testing is a critical email newsletter best practice.

You should be constantly testing anything that is going to be a more or less permanent part of your newsletter and any kind of promotion that you plan to use more than once.

You do this by splitting your list of subscribers into two groups, A and B. Each group gets an email newsletter that is identical except for one different thing. For example, test two different headers to see which version gets more engagement, or two different subject lines for a promotional email.

A/B testing is the only way to really know if a particular line, word, image, or idea is the most effective use of your digital real estate.

#7: The Most Obscure of All Email Newsletter Best Practices: Start With Dessert

One important email newsletter best practice around writing is to start with the most interesting, important, or relevant bit of information.

Many readers will decide within three seconds if your email newsletter is worth their time. If you hit them with your best stuff first, they are likely to decide that it is.

Once you have their attention, you can keep them engaged with an open loop. This means you don’t finish the story or give them the “payoff” right away. They’ll have read the rest of your newsletter, or at least the rest of the article, to satisfy their curiosity.

#8: Power Up Your Headers and Subject Line

You can increase reader engagement by being more creative, or at least more thoughtful, with your headers and subject line.

If you're covering a subject that most people have already heard about a million times, then come up with wacky, intriguing headlines that will pique their curiosity and create engagement.

On the other hand, when you're sharing important news or something new your readers haven’t yet seen, announce it in your subject line and headers. Curiosity is one of the most compelling human emotions.

#9: Read it Out Loud Before You Send

The software will correct most of your spelling and grammar mistakes, but communication issues can still come up. Sometimes the placement of a comma can change the meaning in significant ways.

Speaking is inherently different from reading. When you read your newsletter out loud, your ears will pick up things that your eyes can miss. If it feels unnatural or uncomfortable to say something, then it's probably not a good idea to write it that way either.

By reading your work out loud, your feelings take on the role of a skilled editor.

#10: Use the Right Tools and Platform

Most of these email newsletter best practices will run more smoothly if you have the right systems and automation in place to do them.

You could paste together a lot of different apps to handle your deliverability, manage and automate your referral system, send your email at the right time and place so it gets opened, run A/B tests, and handle the many other chores that form the ten best practices for email newsletters.

Or, you could take care of all of these best practices with a single service. To boost readership, monetization, deliverability, and testing, beehive integrates all of these and much more in one platform.

Beehiiv gives you all the must-have components for your email newsletter so they work together seamlessly.

Give beehiiv a try today!