Emails are being consumed more frequently again, as studies from 2025 show. Another reason to focus on relevance is to provide newsletter readers with high-quality and informative content.
Your subject line must be in Email.
Do you want to write good newsletters? Don’t give your recipients a reason to delete your newsletter unread! Your subject line must arouse interest and clarify, even dramatize, the benefit of the newsletter for the reader—trigger FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) with your subject line.
Also, pay attention to the correct length of your newsletter subject because email clients such as Gmail and Outlook cut off every additional character after 75 characters, including spaces. To get the highest possible open rate, try to make the subject line no longer than 21 to 40 characters.
With the help of the following example texts for the optimal newsletter subject, you can quickly see what is essential:
- For the newsletter of an insurance company: Your life is silver, your insured life gold!
- For the newsletter of a DIY chain: [Name], spring is approaching: Do you have everything for a great garden?
The added value must become apparent.
Every newsletter needs a raison d’être. Why should your readers open the email? What benefits or added value do they derive from this? Package your subscribers’ gifts from the message into a call-to-action (CTA).
It can be a free download, a discount, or an invitation. No matter what it is, the added value can and may be mentioned and advertised several times. Whether the CTA is presented as a button, text link, or image link is irrelevant. It must become clear what benefit your audience has from reading and interacting. Always keep this in mind when writing a new newsletter.
Your call to action must be specific.
Formulating your CTA on buttons or links such as “Learn more” or “Click here” will drastically reduce the click-through rate. Be accurate!
What exactly does your readership expect after clicking on the button? Should they “register now,” “download the e-book for free,” or “redeem a voucher”? The more precise the prompt, the higher the chance your subscribers will do what you hope for. Each offer is only as good as its formulation!
Focus on your readership
Do you subscribe to a newsletter because you expect benefits, advantages, or discounts, or do you not want to miss helpful news and articles? Then you already know what your readership expects from you.
No one subscribes to a newsletter to receive advertising on an ongoing basis. Write user-centered, use a direct approach and emphasize how readers benefit from this particular newsletter. Focus on your newsletter subscribers.
Here is a newsletter text example for user-centered newsletters:
- “We are writing to you to present our new range of shoes.”
- Better: “Discover your new favorite shoes here!”
Communicate the benefits of the newsletter
Within the first few sentences, it must be clear to the readership what the offer is, why they need it and how they can get it. Take the readers and guide them through this information: Answer the W questions “What,” “Why,” “When,” and “How.”
Your newsletter must sell the offer.
With this content format, the decisive factors are not your product and its characteristics but the concrete and current advantages. Don’t write that your shoes are great, but that your shoes are now on sale, shipped for free, or available in even more colors.
Communicate the benefits instead of the features of your product – one of the most important tips when writing newsletters! Product characteristics are irrelevant if the reader does not understand the benefits they derive from them.
Use vibrant language to activate your readership.
At best, every word in your newsletter text is aimed at evoking an action or emotion in the reader. Get to the point, use active language, and be brief! A newsletter is not the right place to talk shop or chew through facts. What should the newsletter subscriber do and why?
Your text has a more positive effect on the readers if you do without foreign words, filler words, and modal verbs because these words complicate the flow of reading. Our tips for writing newsletters:
- Replace technical terms with understandable synonyms that all people in your readership understand.
- The modal verbs “can,” “should,” and “want” weaken your texts.
- Terms such as “also,” “still,” or “as well,” which are among the filler words, drag readers into the length.
Avoid spam words
Nowadays, spam filters can identify spam on a subject or a preheader and the newsletter text. Avoid phrases that sound like spam or that include terms like “cash,” “free,” “no spam,” or “free.”
Words in capital letters and special characters are also not recommended; the newsletter subscriber may feel yelled at or misinterpret the symbols. By refraining from doing so, you reduce annoyance and thus unsubscribe from your newsletter.
Create closeness with the proper salutation
Your brand and business will become more approachable if you welcome your readership personally and individually. The welcome formula can be different and formulated differently depending on the industry or company.
The easiest way is to orient yourself on other existing content you publish through your company website, company blog, or employee magazine. A personalized greeting does not mean any additional effort for you, as you can simply add a custom salutation formula to your text with your newsletter software.
Conclusion: Put yourself in the shoes of your newsletter subscribers
Our best tip comes to an end: It’s easier to write a newsletter that you would like to receive and read yourself – this will improve the quality of email marketing.
Not only can your newsletter draw your target group’s attention to yourself, but also, with a website and suitable content, you attract exemplary visitors to your pages. Whether you create a new Outlook distribution list or use your existing one, it does not matter – good newsletters do not write themselves. It’s all about the content!
