An agency that I was once in contact with sent me a newsletter recently. It’s just relaunched its corporate website and wanted to tell everyone about it.
If you really believe an updated website is newsworthy enough to send an email, you need to make it very obvious to the reader why it’s useful to them.
Here’s the text (bold text my emphasis):
[Agency X] launches new website
We’ve got some important news for you about [agency X].
[Agency X] is today relaunching our corporate website, enabling us to home in on our business focus and resources with even greater clarity than before.
So we’re the same, only better. From today, we can work together more closely because we can now better explain everything we do and how we do it.
Our website relaunch is just the first step towards our goal of becoming more in tune with the needs of our clients and turning ourselves into an organisation that’s open and ready to share.
Our new corporate website will make it much easier to find out about our company and the services and solutions we offer. Our relaunch will also help us to boost our brand reputation and online presence.
We very much appreciate your continued confidence and support, and encourage you to have a look at our new corporate site and let us know your thoughts and suggestions.
We’ll see you online.
This agency doesn’t send many emails, so I opened it thinking it was sure to be worthwhile. The problem is the text is all about ‘us’ and ‘why our website is good for us’. At the moment, the ‘we’ versus ‘you’ count (in all their forms) is roughly 23 to 5.
It should be about ‘you’ (i.e. the intended audiences) and ‘how our website will help you’. There should be some useful links to new or improved information, plus a few highlighted benefits.
Make it easy for the reader to go to the updated areas of relevance to them. What will they truly want to know? I very much doubt they care about the agency’s plans for boosting its brand (unless it means more expensive services, of course!).
This was a great chance for the agency to say ‘hey, remember us?’ and to highlight all of its great services and benefits. Do you think it could have done better too? Leave a comment!