AWeber Email Marketing Tips

Freshen Up Your Email Campaign for Fall

Kids aren’t the only ones overhauling their fashion for the fall. This back-to-school season, take time to evaluate your email campaign – it might be in need of a facelift.

Freshening up your campaign once in a while is a great way to test new elements you’ve always wanted to try and to avoid subscriber fatigue – your readers might be getting bored of seeing your content in the same template every week.

We’ll take a look at how one company overhauled their campaign this year and give you some tips on elements you might want to change in your own emails for a fresh new look.

A Campaign Overhaul

Very Short List, a daily curated email, updated their email campaign earlier this year, and they got creative with their announcement:

They presented subscribers with this color-coded blueprint of their complete overhaul. This facelift has it all: a fresh look, content developed around new categories, and a new format that includes more content in each email than subscribers are used to reading.

Yet their header effectively prepares subscribers for the new look. The creators of Very Short List included a longer explanation of the changes in the body of the email, but the header lays it all out for subscribers in a simple, striking way. If you don’t have time to read all the gory details, you still know exactly what to expect thanks to the effective visuals.

There are a few points to take away here for your own campaign:

Let your subscribers know what’s changing. Whether you’re trying a new frequency or changing your template, tell your subscribers ahead of time so they’re not surprised. Mention the upcoming changes in your subject line too, for subscribers who may not have time to open and read your whole message.
Give your subscribers some options. Not everyone will want to know all of the whys behind your creative decisions. Present need-to-know details in an easily digestible format, whether it’s a graphic or a simple bullet point list of what they can expect.

Now let’s look at what you might want to change in your own campaign.

Update Your Design

You don’t have to give your emails such a drastic overhaul to create a new look for the fall. Think about including elements you might not have in your current template or changing things that are there already:

Sidebars

Sidebars come in handy for navigation links, announcing upcoming events or even offering a preview of next week’s message content.

Adding a sidebar can give more structure to your newsletter, relegating incidental information to its own section and giving more importance to your main articles.

Share Buttons

Do you offer subscribers a way to share your emails on social networks? Adding share buttons to your messages is a quick and easy change you can make to your template. Include sharing options for major social networks your subscribers are on – Facebook, Twitter, maybe even Pinterest.

Number of Articles Included

Before Very Short List overhauled their campaign, their emails used to include one short paragraph about a cool book, film, album or special event. Their revamp made their content more visual, with three short bullet points focused on the day’s theme. The messages are still short and easy to digest in a few seconds, but the variety of content is new.

A fall facelift is perfect for testing the amount of content in your own emails. Do you typically send out one or two articles in a blog broadcast? Try three or four short summaries instead – just change the RSS variable in your template. Is your newsletter packed with content? Try scaling back and see how your readers respond.

Subject Lines

Very Short List’s overhaul included a small adjustment to their subject line. Before, it included branding and a headline:

Now it includes the day’s topic, too:

Could your subject line use some updating? Try a new structure, adding or subtracting your business’s name, or something else new to catch your subscribers’ eyes. Run a split test on your new subject line to see which gets better open rates.

Get a Fresh New Look

These are just a few starting points to spruce up your campaign for the season. What changes are your contemplating for your own campaign? Have you given your emails an overhaul in the past? Was it the color, the layout, a few small details or a completely new template? Did you see improvements after the change? Share your stories in the comments below!

There’s nothing better than a new template to update your campaign for the fall. Try our new back-to-school template for a fresh fall theme. Find it in the template gallery.

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By: Rebekah Henson
Rebekah Henson on Google

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2 Comments

Andrew Woo

I’m helping my fiance who’s a photographer makeover her newsletter content. Instead of just sending out a weekly email w/ all of her new photos from last week, we plan on sending out emails more than once a week centered around different themes.

The beauty is that she already has the content on her blog from the last few years.

For example, she takes pics of DC and nature. Maybe one day its just sunrises, pics of the DC monument, flowers etc.

Any business can do this. They just need to pick out some themes, and copy and paste content or links to articles into the newsletter.

These can also double as auto-responders for new subscribers.
8/28/2012 10:59 am
Randall Magwood

I generally stick with text emails, but with all the features with HTML emails, i may have to re-think my strategy. Sidebars and share buttons are things that i can definitely use.
10/29/2012 9:09 pm