Your list is growing and your engagement looks healthy, but most of your clicks happen in the first few stories and readers rarely reach the end of the newsletter. One simple fix is a Read Magnet.

Low scroll depth can have plenty of causes: the copy isn’t pulling people along, the content further down isn’t as relevant, or the template is hard to read on a phone.

Each of these weak points is a variable that can be the basis of email marketing tests that can be run to improve performance.

Another thing you can do to get people scrolling further is to introduce “Read Magnets” to your newsletter template. A Read Magnet is an element in your template that’s specifically designed to prompt readers to scroll further than they usually would.

This is particularly useful for publishers that send out longer newsletters covering top content from the previous week, or a curated newsletter that’s more of a long-form design. It can also work well for ecommerce newsletters that need more readers to reach a CTA near the end of a template.

A Read Magnet Example

Imagine a publisher sends out a regular roundup of their most popular articles. 70% of clicks are recorded in the top 25% of the newsletter. The further down the template you get, the fewer clicks are recorded.

To improve performance, the email marketer wants more readers to scroll to the end of the template. This will allow more readers to find content that interests them. It also means more readers see the ads further down the newsletter, which matters if you sell sponsorships.

To meet this challenge, a Read Magnet is added toward the end of each campaign. In this case, a giveaway unit is introduced, promoting a different giveaway in each newsletter. Each giveaway is also mentioned at the start of the newsletter to inform subscribers about what they will find if they just scroll to the end.

Over time, subscribers will get used to there always being something enticing at the end of each newsletter, and so scrolling to the end of your campaigns will gradually become second nature to them.

Types of Newsletter Read Magnets

There are plenty of different types of read magnets to try out. You’ll want to test a few to see which work well for your subscribers. You might also want change these up every so often to keep your content fresh. Here are a few ideas:

Question and Answer

Ask a relevant trivia question at the start of your newsletter, and provide the answer at the end.

Secret Prizes

Offer occasional secret prizes at the end of your newsletter. Announce the winners at the start of the next campaign. This will lead to FOMO, promoting more subscribers to scroll to the end of future campaigns.

Giveaways

Mention your giveaway prize at the start of your newsletter, but don’t include the instructions to enter the giveaway until the end of your template.

Exclusive Offers:

Use the space at the end of your newsletter to offer discount codes, flash sales, subscriber-only offers, etc.

Free Downloads

Produce free downloadable PDFs, whitepapers, cheat sheets, ebooks, courses, etc. that can easily be accessed from the end of your newsletter template.

Conversation Starter

At the end of your newsletter, ask your readers a question. Bring them into the fold. Ask them to reply to the email with their response, then talk about the responses in a future newsletter. Promoting genuine conversation like this can really help to build an affinity with your readers, and lead to more subscribers consistently making it to the end of your campaigns.

How to Measure Whether It’s Working

Email apps don’t report how far people scroll, so you have to infer it. The most reliable way is to look at clicks by position: tag each link with its place in the newsletter, for example with a utm_content value like story-1, story-6 or footer, and compare how clicks are spread before and after you add a Read Magnet.

Avoid judging it on opens or “read time” metrics. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads many emails automatically, which makes those numbers unreliable. Clicks on the last few links, and replies if your magnet asks a question, tell you much more.

How Will You Use Read Magnets?

Read Magnets are a simple way to get more readers to the end of your newsletter, and surprisingly few newsletters use them deliberately.

But before jumping in and adding a Read Magnet to your own newsletters, carefully consider your audience, what they will find valuable, and what is most likely to work. From there, run some tests. Try out some different ideas to see what resonates with your own subscribers, and keep a close eye on your results.