5 Email Newsletter Tricks to Steal from Top Influencers

5 Email Newsletter Tricks to Steal from Top Influencers

I don’t have the time to go through and read all of my email subscriptions all of the time (literally, who does?), but I’m the kind of person who will open each of my emails just to get rid of the notification, so occasionally something super spectacular catches my eye. And recently, something caught my eye that inspired this entire post.

I love when I see someone else do something so incredibly genius with their online marketing that I have to share it with everyone, so that’s what this entire post is about. I scrolled through a ton of email newsletters that I’ve received during the past few weeks to find the most genius parts of those newsletters.

It seems to be a trend now to put minimal design into email newsletters (to each his own), but I love emails that are more than just basic text. Basic text newsletters can be efficient, but they’re not gonna land you in a roundup of the best tricks I’ve seen in email newsletters.

So, without further ado, here are a few tricks that you should definitely probably steal for your own newsletter.


1. Pin it for later.

Kristie Hill from Blog Ambitions sent out a newsletter including a summary of her most recent blog post. She included a link to her blog post (which is very awesome–I actually have a .co domain extension for my new digital lifestyle blog that I’m launching), but did something else underneath, which is extremely clever.

Not everyone is going to have the time to read your blog post at the same time that they’re reading your email. So she included a link for users to pin to read later.

Email Newsletter Tricks to Steal from Top Influencers

This is a great way to get your email list to share your blog post so that others can read it, but in a way that makes it convenient for the readers themselves to go back and find it later.

Seriously genius.

Steal this trick: Create a button or a link in your email newsletter that links to your pin of this blog post. This way, your reader is taken to Pinterest and can easily click the Save button and save it to one of their boards.


2. Forward to a friend.

If you have been following me for awhile, you know all about my serious love for Buffer. If not, basically Buffer is the best scheduler out there, their blog is amazing, they can do no wrong, blah blah blah.

So of course I have an example from one of their emails to include in here.

One of the incredible things about Buffer is the amount of seriously awesome content they put together and share with their users fo’ free. Seriously, go look at their blog and tell me that’s not the best damn content you’ve ever seen (I mean, aside from my blog–don’t get me wrong, you should love me too ❤️).

Moving on. So they share a ton of content on their blog and their new podcast. But this means that they have so much value on their blog that they don’t spend extra time creating content for their newsletter; they simply share links to their blog. And that’s okay since their blog is worth it.

Since Buffer’s blog content is so valuable, they know that a lot of their email subscribers will love it, and will think that their friends might love it, too. So they’ve included a quick and easy link to get subscribers to forward the email to a friend.

Email Newsletter Tricks to Steal from Top Influencers

Everyone has friends and coworkers that might be able to benefit from this content, but not everyone thinks about forwarding this email without a small little push. So Buffer has added a call-t0-action to remind people to share, share, share. Which is a great idea. If you subscribe to my email newsletter (you can do so in the sidebar–it’s awesome), you’ll see that I include a Forward button after every news excerpt I discuss, to increase chances of someone realizing a friend could benefit from this information.

Steal this trick: Email service providers have lots of awesome merge tags to help you do a lot of things. Add the forward (*|FORWARD|* in Mailchimp) merge tag to your email to create a link allowing your readers to easily forward your email newsletter to a friend.


3. View archives.

I recently had someone reach out to me to ask if I had an archive of my past email newsletters. If you use your newsletter to send out valuable content, you want to have an archive accessible so that new subscribers can go back to see what they’ve missed.

Jay Baer with Convince & Convert includes a section at the bottom of his newsletter specifically for readers who want to check out past emails.

Email Newsletter Tricks to Steal from Top Influencers

This is a great way to get even more enthusiastic subscribers, because they’re able to see that you provide some incredible value in your emails each day/week/month.

Steal this trick: How you access your archive depends on your email service provider.


4. Include a countdown.

You’ve probably seen this a few times before, but it’s a great idea to include in an email about a temporary discount or sale on a course or other product/service: a countdown timer.

XO Sarah‘s new course Dare to Grow has temporary enrollment, so she has used a countdown timer in her email to show readers how much longer they have to sign up for her new course. When you include a countdown, you’re putting time ticking directly in front of your potential customer’s face. This increases the urgency that they need to buy your product or service or sign up for your course now, because they won’t be able to do it forever.

Email Newsletter Tricks to Steal from Top Influencers

If you ever send out emails where you’re talking about anything temporary, and you want your readers to take action now, include a countdown.

Steal this trick: Sarah is using a third party service called MotionMail to create her countdown. MotionMail has both free and paid account options. You can create an unlimited number of countdown timers with a free account, however the MotionMail branding will be present on your timer. Once you’ve created your timer and set your end date, MotionMail will give you an embed code for you to embed the timer into your email.


5. Focus on design.

When creating an email newsletter, you don’t have a lot of design options. You have some drag and drop; one, two, or three columns to work with; and a few choice web fonts.

However, Brit + Co is a design-focused business, and they know that their options with an email service provider aren’t good enough. So they’ve designed the entire aesthetic of their email newsletter.

Email Newsletter Tricks to Steal from Top Influencers

Their email newsletters always look clean, and keep to the Brit + Co design aesthetic. If your business is also design-heavy, this may be an option that you want to use in your own email newsletters.

Steal this trick: First, I want to note that you only want to steal this trick if your business is design-heavy and/because you are a designer and are extremely well-versed in the Adobe Suite. If so, you would simply use Adobe Illustrator to create each of the elements for your newsletter and insert them into your newsletter as images.


Have you seen some seriously awesome email newsletter tricks recently? Share them with me in the comments!

P.S. How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Email List

2 Comments

  • rocio

    This is a great article thanks!

  • Danielle

    Ooh there are some really cool ideas here. I'm intrigued by the "pin for later" button within the email. Have you tried this in your own?

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