Most newsletters are bloated.
Here’s how to trim the fat in your newsletter:
1. Lose the parts of your intro no one cares about — like how many new subscribers you got this week. Get to the valuable stuff.
2. Ease up on the emojis. It’s a newsletter, not a MySpace page.
3. When you’re done writing your newsletter, do a word count and then force yourself to delete 20% of the words.
4. Not every sentence needs to have an accompanying image with it — it’s a newsletter, not a scrapbook.
5. That paragraph you have at the top saying who you are and what the newsletter is? The one that’s the same every week? No one’s reading that.
6. I’d rather get a weekly short story from you than a monthly novel. (This isn’t about books.)
7. Do sponsors really need a giant image of their logo that looks like an ad and therefore is ignored by your readers? There are better ways to deliver attention to sponsors.
8. You found 20 links worth sharing? Good for you. Now cut 10 of them and save them for the next issue.
9. People are more likely to read (and share) your article if your newsletter contains a short summary and link to it on your site than the full text in the email.
10. The more actions you ask readers to take, the less likely they are to take one.