Are your audiences reading your newsletter? Or are they using it to make Halloween costumes? Are they recycling it into shellacked paper coasters? If it’s electronic, are they deleting it? Questions like these preoccupy communications specialists.
The book Your Attention, Please describes how it’s becoming difficult to attract sustained interest from readers. Before the Internet, people were likely to take their time reading mail. Now, we’re deluged with hundreds of e-mails. Many of them are newsletters.
How can you bring your moribund newsletter to life and make it stand out from the mass of spam and other undesirable messages? Here are a few guidelines to help you revive your copy. (A great way to bring your newsletter back from the dead is to hire me as a consultant. I specialize in bringing science-related newsletters to life.)
A zombie peeks out from behind a long newsletter. (Actually, this graphic is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s zombie apocalypse blog post.)
Your newsletter’s vital signs may fizzle if:
- Your newsletter is focused on your organization, not your readers. One reason your newsletters are gathering dust may be that they are not speaking to the needs and interests of your audiences. Think about how your organization can be a good conversationalist. Don’t be the person at the cocktail party who bores everyone by holding forth about uninteresting topics. Cut out the content that won’t interest your audiences. If it’s necessary to keep it for other reasons, bury it behind a link.
- Your content is too text-heavy. Are you requiring readers to wade through long paragraphs of text to find buried nuggets of valuable information? They probably won’t. When reading online, your audiences will skim the content. Use short paragraphs, straightforward language, and links. Use bold font to emphasize key points.
- Your newsletter is not in the right medium. Do your audiences adore Pinterest but ignore snail mail? Do they avoid social media in favor of sifting through their email? If you choose the right delivery medium for your newsletter, that can increase readers’ interest.
- You need to work on your messaging and engagement strategies. If you’re promoting events that no one attends or recommending actions that no one takes, you may have a messaging problem. You may not be communicating the benefits of taking action. The actions may be too difficult for your readers. If you provide easy-to-take actions and communicate their benefits clearly, you may get better results.
- Your most interesting content is buried. Where are those bits of gold – the most valuable information in your existing newsletter? Dig them out and bring them to the beginning. Think of your newsletter as a newspaper article. Journalists typically begin an article with the most important information, if they’re using the inverted pyramid style of writing.
Keep your newsletter simple, useful, concise and interesting. Your readers shouldn’t have to get out a shovel to dig out your most valuable content. If you make your readers’ lives easier, they will appreciate it. Redesigning your approach to newsletter writing can turn a yawn into a smile. Even dead newsletters can be revived.
Kat Friedrich 