Change is good in newsletter design. This article explains how you can keep your standard message templates the same issue after issue yet tweak elements to keep them fresh.

I don’t know about you, but for the past few weeks I got increasingly irritated watching TV. Of course, all the commercials (which I usually mute) were holiday-themed, complete with snowflakes, Santas and Christmas music. And scarves, lots of scarves. You eventually get used to the one-pitch note of these commercials and expect that, until January anyway, that’s what you’re going to get. But what started to get under my skin was the fact that after a couple of weeks, I had seen the same commercial at least a couple dozen times – and I don’t even watch that much TV!

How many times did you sit through the Mastercard commercial, where the guy gives his girlfriend first a box of tissues, then a paper bag, until she realizes that the reason for these odd gifts is that they’ve each won identical, brand new Porsches! She cries with joy (needing the tissues) then starts to hyperventilate, (using the paper bag to breathe into), before she finally faints. It was a cute ad. But after seeing it 50 or so times, I was sick of it. Why couldn’t they have taken the concept and created a few more ads, different from the first, yet true to the campaign? Were the creators that short of creativity, or did it not even occur to them to create a series of ads instead of just the one?

Using Themes to Engage Readers

The same can be applied to your email marketing. You may have a template and some proven things that work for you. That undoubtedly makes it easy to simply repeat what has worked in the past, with relatively minor updates, and keep churning out the same thing again and again. But a little creativity can go a long way. Why not create a theme that you can use to drive your email campaigns for several months, each email’s message and creative building on the last, but still new and unique.

Themes can really work well, regardless of whether your newsletter is a compilation of articles, a retail newsletter, or a call to action. Organizing things into categories  and themes helps our minds relate to them. The human mind naturally seeks to find patterns. It likes order and when we find it, it makes us feel more comfortable. After all, nature itself is composed of myriads of patterns (think of the nautilus, a beehive, the orderly shape of a pinecone), and having things categorized for us makes it easier for us to think about them.

What’s more, once you’ve established the theme, your readers know better what to expect and may develop an increased interest in your emails because they’ve become a kind of ongoing series, rather than each one being an individual one-off.  Or, you can apply the idea differently. Each of your emails can have a theme unto itself. It becomes a series because each subsequent email has a different theme.  Even if you don’t see a noticeable change in readerships, opens, clicks, etc., you gain credit for obviously having put some thought into your emails and for trying to make them more readable and compelling for your subscribers. 

The idea behind this is that your emails are all part of a campaign. But when one conducts an “email campaign” often this refers to the one email sent out to your list, rather than an email series, emails sent the list over several months. Sure, emailers conduct drip campaigns and follow-up campaigns, but these have to do with the offer or how the list is segmented and isn’t the same kind of themed emails where the theme reoccurs each month.

The irony of the Mastercard sweepstake ad is that it is part of an extremely popular and successful ad campaign (where they list the price of things e.g. fishing pole: $49, fishing tackle $15, bait $4, then “Time spent with your son: priceless”). The trouble with the sweepstakes ad is that they only made one instead of a series of them to fit with their overall “priceless” theme. Why!? TV-watchers everywhere would have appreciated a little more creative effort on the advertiser’s part!

It's Easy to Be Creative With Email

With email, it’s relatively easy and relatively cheap to change things up and experiment. Try creating a theme for your emails and carrying the theme through for a few months. You can even announce that your starting a campaign and that this email is the first in a series based on the topic or theme X.  Lists are an easy way to apply a theme. One of the easiest and most popular is the “top ten” list (or some other number). Tell your readers that you’re going to cover in your emails the Top 5 of something (top 5 ways to cut your energy consumption, top 10 digital camera models) and that each email will explore the topic in depth, starting with Number 1. Or each month you could have a different top something list…

It has been said that creativity means letting go of certainties. You may be comfortable doing what you know has worked in the past, but you must also be comfortable with the same level of results. Novelist John Updike said that "Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity . . . any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."  The beauty of email is that there is always a way to try to do things better, in this case by creating a true “email campaign” that carries a common theme over the course of several emails rather than simply repeating what you’ve done in the past.

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