Email marketing has been declared dead roughly once every two years since about 2008.

Write for one person, not a whole mailing list

The quickest way to write something nobody feels is meant for them is to try to write for everyone at once.

“The audience”, “the subscribers” and “the mailing list” are all useful things to think about strategically, but when you actually sit down to write, picture one real person instead. A client, a customer, someone who might realistically open your email while they’re waiting for a meeting to start or half-watching telly in the evening.

Think about what they’re dealing with right now, what would genuinely be useful to them and what might make them stop scrolling through a crowded inbox for a few seconds.

The newsletters that get read tend to feel like they were written to someone, rather than blasted at a database.

Send it from a human being

This sounds obvious, but it gets overlooked surprisingly often.

Emails from addresses like info@, newsletter@, marketing@ or sales@ immediately feel more like they’ve come from a system than a person. Where possible, send your newsletter from a real name.

Something like natasha@wingwomanplus.co.uk feels more recognisable and more human. It’s a tiny detail, but if your newsletter is there to build familiarity and trust, it helps when it actually looks like it came from somebody.

Subject lines aren’t summaries

Your subject line only really has one job: give someone enough of a reason to open the email.

It doesn’t need to summarise every topic inside it, and it definitely doesn’t need to sound like the title of a quarterly board presentation.

Our inboxes are busy places. Your email is competing with meeting reminders, sales offers, school emails, Amazon notifications and somebody’s aunt forwarding a recipe for brownies, so short, specific and human tends to work better than trying to cram the whole newsletter into twelve words.

Open rates can be useful for comparing performance over time, but they’re no longer a perfect measure of attention because of things like Apple Mail Privacy Protection. That makes it even more important to look at the wider picture, including clicks, replies and what people actually do after receiving your emails.

Don’t confuse ‘designed’ with ‘readable’

There are some very beautiful newsletters out there. Clever layouts, moving graphics, colourful CTA buttons, multiple sections, lots going on.

They can look brilliant, but good design doesn’t automatically mean good communication.

For plenty of service businesses and B2B brands, a simpler email can work incredibly well because it feels more like a useful note from a person than a polished campaign. Most people are reading email on their phone too, and they’re usually scanning quickly to work out whether there’s anything in it for them.

Design still matters, of course. It should make your email easier to read and reinforce your brand. The writing still needs to do the heavy lifting though.

Clear words, obvious relevance and something useful to say will always beat a gorgeous template with no real point.

One idea is usually enough

Another very common newsletter trap is trying to squeeze absolutely everything into one email.

Suddenly you’ve got a company update, a new blog post, an upcoming event, a team announcement, three offers, four calls to action and a partridge in a pear tree. It starts to feel less like a newsletter and more like somebody saying, “Just before you go…” five times while you’re already halfway out of the room.

Before you write, decide what the main job of the email is.

Maybe you want to tell people about a new service and get them to visit a page on your website. Maybe you want to share one useful idea that helps people understand how you work. Maybe you want to remind previous customers that you exist and give them a reason to come back.

One clear idea and one obvious next step will usually make the email much easier to read and much easier to act on.

You can always send another one next month for everything else.

Timing matters, but consistency matters more

There is endless advice online about the “best” day and time to send marketing emails. Tuesday morning at 8.22am. Thursday afternoon. Sunday evening so you’re sitting nicely at the top of the inbox on Monday morning.

Those kinds of benchmarks can give you somewhere to start, but your own audience data will eventually tell you far more.

The bigger thing to think about is rhythm. If people hear from you regularly, your emails start to feel familiar rather than random. That might mean once a month, every other month or fortnightly. There’s no prize for emailing more often if you’ve got nothing useful to say.

Choose a frequency you can realistically maintain and give people something worth opening when you do send.

Over time, that familiarity builds recognition and trust, and trust is what drives replies, clicks, enquiries and conversations.

A smaller list can be a healthier one

This bit is less about writing and more about who you’re sending to, but it’s important enough to include.

It’s very tempting to think a bigger email database automatically means better results. In reality, a huge list full of people who haven’t opened or clicked anything for years isn’t necessarily doing you any favours.

Inactive subscribers can make your performance harder to interpret and can affect deliverability over time. A smaller, engaged audience is often far more valuable than a big dusty one.

Cleaning your list occasionally also gives you much clearer data. You can see which topics people respond to, which links they click and which kinds of emails seem to spark replies or conversations.

That gives you a much better clue about what to write next.

If you want to go deeper into the technical side of this, including sender reputation, inactive contacts and deliverability, have a read of our guide to email list hygiene and deliverability.

The simplest test before you send

This is going to sound slightly daft, but it works: read the email out loud.

If it sounds stiff, change it. If it doesn’t sound like you or your brand, change it. If you stumble over a sentence or get to the end gasping for breath, definitely change it.

The newsletters people enjoy reading rarely sound like “marketing”. They sound like a person talking to another person and sharing something useful.

If there’s a sentence you would never actually say to a client, customer or colleague in real life, that’s usually a good sign it needs another pass.nuinely want your emails.