Cutting irritants from your newsletters
The fastest way for any email marketer to lose their regular readers is to irritate them with the layout of the newsletter until they redirect your newsletters to their junk mail folder. This is actually worse than when they unsubscribe. You stay ignorant of the fact that they are no longer bothering to read your newsletters.
Take time to look at your own newsletters critically and from the perspective of how your readers experience it and what they see. It is so tempting to use bold and large fonts and then emphasise your point with huge exclamation marks. It's understandable that you want to convey urgency and call attention to something, but you achieve quite the opposite most of the time by adding exclamation marks. It's too easy for your readers to gain the impression that you are volatile.
Aggravation is bad
It gives the impression that you are a tad juvenile in your exuberance. If you feel an exclamation mark coming on, rephrase the sentence of paragraph. Your words alone should convey importance or urgency. Sound and music is known to influence the mood of people. It can be used to great effect and it can be an ultimate irritant. So if you want to use music, make sure it is top-notch.
The most important thing though is to give the readers choice. If they cannot switch off the sound they hear, they will summarily close your newsletter. When this happens you have lost out on a great marketing strategy.
Give them the ability to silence the music. Even more practical is to default the music to be off and let readers decide for themselves if they want to switch on the audio. This shows consideration and respect.
