For a successful newsletter, you not only need a good concept. You also need to make your email marketing stand out from the general oversupply of information. In this article, I'll explain how you can attract more readers to your emails and how you can actually reach these people.

When I visit a website these days, I am often confronted with a number of notices and "call to actions" within the first few seconds. The now well-known cookie banner is waiting for me - sometimes more, sometimes less user-friendly.

The site would also love to notify me of new posts directly in the browser. Shortly afterwards, a chat window pops up in case I have any questions. And once I've clicked all that away, another pop-up predictably follows: "Subscribe to the newsletter now!" However, it's not always clear why I should do this. Maybe I'm being enticed with a coupon code.

Before you simply integrate such a newsletter pop-up, take a look at the following tips, hints and suggestions. They are divided into two subtopics:

1. How to gain more readers for your emails
2. How to better reach your existing readers

Because for your email marketing to be successful, you need more than just a stream of new readers. You want to get the right people excited about you and you have to keep asserting yourself in a sea of information.

Attract more readers to your emails

In the previous parts of this article series, we have already looked at possible formats and areas of application for email marketing as well as setting up a good concept. So I assume that you already know which people you want to reach with your email marketing and how.

For this article, I'm assuming that you want to implement and promote a newsletter or email series. You have thought about what might interest your target group. And you have set yourself a clear goal for your activities.

If not, you should read up on this now in the two articles linked above. Because this is the foundation on which you will build your future e-mail success. 

Important information for more registrations

To get more people to sign up to your mailing list, you need to answer a few important questions in advance and do so as briefly and concisely as possible.

A key question is: Why should you register at all?

As mentioned above, I often see a coupon code as an incentive. There's nothing wrong with that either, but it's more of a short-term measure: once a person has used their code, you have to make sure that they stick with it and don't simply unsubscribe from the mailing list. This is why it is so important that you have found a coherent concept that your future customers will find relevant regardless of such a reward.

Special offers that can only be found in the newsletter can be an incentive. But the content itself is also important. Think like a content marketer here: How can I best help my readership? What do they find interesting, useful and relevant? So name the benefits that the newsletter offers and describe in advance why they should definitely read it.

You need to get to the heart of these arguments when you advertise your newsletter. Think about a handful of bullet points. Maybe you can even put it in a single, snappy sentence. The important thing here is to be as specific as possible and state exactly what your emails offer.

A helpful element in all of this is the "social proof". This means that you show, for example, how many people have already signed up. This creates trust.

Another important piece of information is the frequency: How often do people receive an e-mail from you? Make this clear. Ideally, you should not flood your readership with messages, as discussed in more detail in the article on the concept.

Last but not least, it is helpful to state that you will not send spam and that you will only use the e-mail address for this purpose and will not pass it on (which you will of course adhere to). This may seem obvious to you. However, it is a good idea to state this specifically in order to create further trust. It is also helpful to explicitly state how you can unsubscribe at any time.

Ultimately, the aim here is to dispel any potential concerns. After all, your own e-mail inbox is a very personal thing and some people are reluctant to enter their e-mail address on a site they hardly know because of bad experiences.

An important note at this point: At this point, I am only talking about the information and details that you should include in order to gain more trust. For legal reasons, you will need to provide more details. These questions will be dealt with in a separate article.

A simple registration wins

Apart from this important or legally required information, you should make the registration form for your newsletter or email series as simple as possible. It is sometimes tempting to ask for additional data such as the person's name, company, interests, etc.

For legal reasons alone, you must not make such fields mandatory in your email marketing. But you should also avoid complex queries and forms for reasons of user experience. Instead, reduce the registration form to the absolutely necessary information that you actually want to use later.

Otherwise, you may find that interested parties leave it alone or "put it off until later" because they don't have the time or the spirit to deal with it at the moment.

And where do you advertise this now?

Once you've done all this, the next question is where and how to advertise your email offer.

I have already mentioned the typical newsletter pop-ups above. They can be perceived as annoying, so it is important that you design them correctly for your email marketing. The basic information mentioned should be quickly apparent. People need to understand within seconds why they should sign up and why they can trust you with their email address.

Further possibilities:

• Within or at the end of suitable content in your corporate blog or magazine.
• Self-promotion, for example in the sidebar of your website.
• In the footer of the page.
• As a pop-up that appears when the mouse pointer moves out of the window (aka "Exit Intent").
• And of course via your social media channels.

In other words: If you take email marketing seriously, you promote it like your other products and offers. 

Interim conclusion

In a nutshell: You can attract more subscribers with the right thematic focus, all the important information before registration and a registration process that is as simple as possible.

Reach the existing readers

Once you've set everything up so far, your email list should gradually fill up with new readers. Your next challenge is to actually reach these people. On the one hand, there are technical hurdles in the way. On the other hand, you have to earn their attention again and again.

Technical hurdles

The technical hurdles primarily include the various filters and, first and foremost, anti-spam mechanisms. You must therefore ensure that your messages are not regarded as unwanted advertising.

There are basic settings here to present yourself as a good sender to these systems. The keywords here are SPF, DKIM and DMARC. These allow you to prove your authenticity. They also help to make it more difficult to misuse your URL as a sender for spam.

It is also important to keep your mailing list up to date. Your newsletter tool should automatically sort out unreachable addresses ("bounces") . Ideally, it should recognize whether it is a permanent problem ("hard bounce"), for example if an address no longer exists, or whether it is a temporary problem ("soft bounce"), perhaps because the receiving mail server was temporarily unavailable. If you ignore bounces, this can have a negative impact on your reputation with Google & Co.

On top of that, make sure that your readers can easily unsubscribe if they are no longer interested. Don't hide this link, otherwise they may mark your email as spam, which can reduce your deliverability.

Another important element is the question of how you organize the mass mailing of your emails. You will often use an external provider such as Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Clever Elements or CleverReach. These services keep a close eye on their delivery rates. In other words, they set strict rules so that email providers such as Gmail and others let their messages through. You can also send your emails from a server that you set up yourself. However, you then have to make sure that your emails are not blocked. And that's not so easy these days.

Other warning signals for spam filters can also be certain words that frequently appear in spam messages or missing information about the sender and how to unsubscribe from the emails.

Gmail also pays attention to how often users open the emails. If they lose interest, this can also lead to your messages being classified as "unwanted". For this reason, it is sometimes recommended to either automatically remove inactive users or to regularly ask them to confirm their interest by clicking on an email, for example. Unfortunately, this will cause you to lose readers on a regular basis. But otherwise, your delivery rate may drop, which is much more problematic.

Once the spam filter is in place, some providers have integrated additional functions to sort incoming emails by category. Your newsletter may then not appear centrally in the inbox, but under a separate tab such as "Advertising" or "Newsletter". It can be a good idea to encourage your readers to change this manually so that your messages are not overlooked.

Deserve attention

After all these technical challenges, you next have to prove yourself in the battle for your readers' attention. This is where your content concept comes into play again: hopefully, you always have something in your emails that is interesting and relevant to your readership. But that's not enough:

• Think about which day and time of day your readers are most likely to be receptive to your messages. Example: On Monday mornings, email inboxes are already full and your readers are already stressed from the start of the week. On Friday before the lunch break, they may be more receptive, but not always receptive to complex information.
• Make sure that your subject line is appealing and arouses curiosity without triggering spam filters. Avoid superlatives, for example.
• Don't forget that you have space for a "pre-header": This is a text that is displayed below or after the subject, depending on the email program. If you do not specify this explicitly, the beginning of the email text will simply be used, but this is not always useful or helpful.
• Personalize the information for your various target groups. This is where the segmentation of your email distribution list comes into play: you sort all your recipients into meaningful categories. Example: You differentiate between prospects and existing customers or between active and inactive recipients.
• Last but not least, make sure that your email looks good on all end devices and is perfectly usable. Bear in mind that images in emails are not always displayed reliably. And just in case, there should always be a link to a web version at the beginning of the email.

Conclusion: More reach through email marketing

Of course, it's nice to see your newsletter mailing list grow. But what good are thousands of recipients in the end if only a few dozen actually take action?

That's why it's important not only to design your email offer well and advertise it continuously, but also to earn the attention of your readers again and again.

The real acid test is when you have a new or special offer for these people: If you do everything right, they should be much more open to it than people you reach through advertisements, for example.