Do your newsletters look amatuerish? Do they lack good design? Are they less appealing for your readers to open? Here’s the top 10 tips to more professional real estate newletters.

 1. Design Scannable Newsletters

 According to recent study by usability expert, Henry Niffsen, about 50 percent of readers skimmed or partly read the newsletters. Only 23 percent of readers read the newsletters all the way through. The remaining 27 percent were never opened. So make the text easy to scan by: using short paragraphs using bullet points including plenty of white spacing between topics highlighting topics with uppercase or bold text in HTML newsletters

2. Insert Line Breaks

Improve the readability of your newsletter by formatting it with hard line breaks at 60/65/70 characters per line. You can use a text editor, such as TextPad, and set it to insert hard carriage returns at the end of each 65-character line.

 3. Include Newsletter Title In The Subject Field

 Include your newsletter title at the beginning of the subject field. This will help the reader differentiate your newsletter from junk emails. It will also allow them to filter your newsletter into a separate folder with the use of filters.

4. Make Your Subject Field Sell!

 Advertise the most enticing story of each issue in the subject field. You literally have seconds to grab the readers attention, so make it count.

5. Include A Table Of Content

 Include a table of contents at the top of the newsletter. This will allow readers to scan the topics to see if anything in the newsletter catches their interest.

6. Fix Long Links

Long hyperlinks may be broken when you format emails using hard line breaks at 60/65/70 characters per line. To fix this problem, deselect word wrap after you have inserted the carriage returns. Then manually edit the links to ensure they are on one line. When the email is sent, a link may still wrap onto two lines. But now it will be clickable.

7. Avoid Spam Filters That Flag The “Unsubscribe” Word

 Do not use the word “unsubscribe” in your removal notice. A number of spam filters flag emails containing that particular word as possible spam. The reason is many spammers now offer “unsubscribe” functions that don’t actually do anything.

8. Avoid Spam Filters That Flag Chain Letters

Some spam filters are flagging emails that asks readers to forward the newsletter on as chain letters. Avoid using the word “forward” and any of the following words in the same sentence, “all, anyone, every, friends, many, others, people.” Instead of “forward,” try using “pass,” “share,” or “send.”

9. Reduce Remove Request Emails

 There are two methods to reducing the number of remove email requests from your subscribers: Include a removal notice at the top and bottom of the email. Place the bottom removal request at the very bottom of the email, rather than a few paragraphs from the bottom.

 10. Design User-Friendly HTML Newsletters

 Most people use an 800×600 screen resolution, but the email preview pane is usually much smaller than the full screen. So format your HTML table widths at 500-600 pixels at the most. Better still, use a relative (percentage) width table, which will allow your newsletter to be resized when viewed in different sized windows.

Adopt the above and not only will your newsletters look better but they’ll be opened more often.

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