How to write a newsletter no one wants to read

Whenever I teach a class or workshop on how to write email newsletters, I always ask people what’s hard about writing a newsletter or what questions they have.

These always make the top 5:

• I don’t want to send out junk that no one cares about

• I don’t waste readers’ time (or my own!)

• I don’t like feeling overly promotional

These fears make sense, don’t they? A lot of newsletters are generic, awkward, and/or pushy.

Here’s the main reason why so many newsletters are blah/unreadable:

The newsletter writer is approaching the newsletter as transactional rather than relational.

That’s a fancy way of saying that you’re thinking of your newsletter readers as a group of nameless, faceless people in a crowd (“they”) and wondering how to get them to do something (read your newsletter, click on a link, become a client…)

Without training, it’s easy to go into what you think of as “marketing speak” when you’re writing a newsletter - trying to sound professional, putting yourself in the best light at the expense of your actual personality, and cajoling people (“them”) into going where you want them to go.

No one wants to read that.

Instead of sitting down to write to a faceless group of people who might or might not be your people, try writing a message directly to someone who you care about deeply.

Ideally, this person is someone you’d love to work with as a client.

What would you like to say to them, person to person, today?

This practice will help you move away from transactional and generic emails that feel vaguely icky to emails that matter to your readers and to you.

Put yourself in your writing, show that you care about your reader, try to help. Make it clear why you care about your topic.

These steps are simple to understand, but a bit harder to accomplish.

Keep practicing, be human, be yourself, and it will get easier 🖤

Warmly,

Camille