Anyone can create a company e-newsletter. There are enough tools and guides on the internet to allow even the smallest business to create marketing material with ease. What is more difficult is creating material people want to read. That requires a different set of skills altogether. If you want to learn how to create a company e-newsletter people will actually want to read, this is for you!

Decide if you really need a newsletter

Like every aspect ofbusiness, a newsletter is only worth doing if you can do it well. Before you start, consider if your company has enough to say or has enough going on to warrant an e-newsletter. Larger organisations or those in fast-moving industries will have plenty to talk about, smaller enterprises or those in more mature industries may not.

Choose a focus

Whilegeneral news is all very well, it doesn't generate much interest. Selecting a focus for your company e-newsletter will help with engagement. Don't plan to put everything in there and mix it all up, select a niche, such as product development, company evolution or industry news and stick to stories and features that complement them. It is much more engaging than general stuff.

Select a single call to action

As well as a narrow content focus, a good company e-newsletter will also have a single call to action. One message across the entire content that drives readers to your desired action. The scattergun approach simply doesn't work and becomes diluted. Opting for a single CTA will allow your newsletter to signal a clear intent and reinforce it with repetition.

Keep it clean

Clean design has a huge impact on the engagement. The cleaner the design andthe more white space you have, the more engaged your readers get. Creating a single template that you carry through all your company e-newsletters helps build it into your brand and create expectation within your audience.

Keep it concise

Your readers don't want life stories and you don't want employees sitting at their desks reading your company e-newsletter instead of working. Keep content short and concise and link tolong form copy or full versions of the content as appropriate. Treat the newsletter as teaser copy. Keep it short, concise and to the point with enough to lure the reader into clicking that link.

Be fair

If you're using your company e-newsletter to attract external subscribers, make sure you always allow the option to unsubscribe. If you promise to never share their email address or send them spam, keep that promise. If your headlines promise something, make sure the body copy delivers on it. Being clear and transparent is the only way to gain trust with an external audience. They will repay that transparency with loyalty.

Never stop testing and refining

Finally, to create a company e-newsletter people want to read, you need to continuously test and refine the content, layout, focus and features. Use a platform that lets you see how many emails are opened, how many were deleted without reading and how long visitors stayed on any internal web pages. You can use these findings to refine the offering and improve across the board.