Email newsletters are necessary for small business marketing, but some business owners really dread creating them. And then they can become stale, boring and repetitive. The process can become frustrating and may make you want to give up entirely. You can’t quit sending them because that would be marketing suicide, but you can take some advice from people who love creating email newsletters (aka the Roundpeg team) to help upgrade your own. Hey, you might even gain a new outlook on the process of creating your newsletters. Here are 3 tips to make your newsletter better than before.

Get a Personality – Think about your business. Think about your business’ image. What do you want people to think or feel when they read something written by your company? Put a little bit of yourself into your content. The personal tone helps keep it interesting, but still informative. Even if your audience is super straitlaced, you can still write your content in an interesting way. Bottom line, your newsletter should sound like you, not a drone.

Engaging Subjectline/Headline – The word engaging is so overused when talking about writing. I cannot tell you how many times I heard the word tossed around by my college professors. I rolled my eyes and was like, “Whatever, you should be making this class more engaging.” However, I did learn that writing an email subjectline is really freaking hard. You have to catch the reader’s attention, sum up an entire email, not sound sales-pitchy or cheesy and get the reader to open the email. Remind me again why this wasn’t a course offered in college? Try changing up the way you write your headlines or subjectlines. See what works and what doesn’t. Experimenting is the only way you’ll find out what your audience likes and dislikes.

Don’t Call it a Newsletter – The thing that irks me the most about newsletters is that companies always call them the same thing. This triggers my brain to think that every newsletter I sign up for will be the same. No thanks. Not interested. Decline. Unsubscribe. It’s time to get creative. Stop calling it a newsletter. Make it new and fresh. Don’t call it a mailing list either. Maybe try asking customers to subscribe to your Exclusive Customer Club? Persuade them to sign up by offering information they wouldn’t normally receive if they didn’t subscribe. Play around with different names. Someone on your team is bound to come up with a gem.

As much as you might gripe and groan about writing newsletters, you have to. So make it fun. Change it up and try new techniques. Put your thing down, flip it and reverse it for all I care. A new year is the perfect time to revamp your marketing techniques, so take this time as an opportunity to branch out and do something different.