How To Build a Newsletter: 6 Tried-and-Tested Practices To Follow
In the era of social media and instant messaging, we still use email as the primary communication channel, business or personal. Our inboxes are full of colorful electronic newsletters we like to go through while having our first cup of brew in the morning.
Business-wise, email newsletters do their job like nothing else, generating and converting times more customers than any other marketing tool. Read on to find out how to write an email newsletter that sells and propels your business forward across the board.
What Is an Email Newsletter?
An email newsletter is a periodic letter sent to your targeted contacts to inform them of your brand updates, news, deals, offers, sales, etc. As a rule, an email marketing newsletter is sent weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, depending on the information you need to share.
Businesses use e-newsletters as a way to communicate with their subscribers and tell them about:
- New products that are being developed
- Upcoming sales
- Time-limited offers
- Unfinished purchases
- Shipping updates
- Loyalty programs
- Activities they are involved in
Doing so keeps their audience in the loop and ready to purchase / order / join in, etc. Surprisingly, newsletter emails generate more leads than any social media platform. Thus, many businesses keep working on powerful electronic newsletters, developing their design and quality.
Wonder why it is that important? Read on.
Why Start an Email Newsletter?
As mentioned above, an email newsletter serves a quite tangible goal of converting subscribers into clients through techniques like reminding them to check out the latest deals and offers. Step by step, a company email newsletter helps you acquire high-intent leads interested in purchasing from your store, online or physically.
- Email marketing has become the most powerful and widely used marketing technique in the B2B sector (84%), followed by social media advertising (75%), blogging (69%), SEO (60%), and live events (54%).
There is no magic or luck involved: almost 4.37 billion people use email these days, each receiving a few e-newsletters daily. No doubt, an electronic newsletter does its job brilliantly, increasing your conversion rate and brand popularity.
Source: Campaign Monitor
How To Build an Effective Email Newsletter
1. Identify Your Goals
Newsletter mailing needs to address your primary goal: generate leads, drive traffic, promote certain products, popularize your brand, shorten the sales cycle, or draw referrals.
Once you have your goals, think about KPIs that can measure your email newsletter effectiveness. Look at the number of people who followed your links and compare it with the number of purchases to understand whether your email newsletter works effectively.
2. Find the Best Platform To Build a Newsletter
The next defining step towards influential newsletter emails is to choose the most suitable and efficient email marketing service provider to schedule mass email newsletters to your subscribers’ database.
You will see ConvertKit, Omnisend, HubSpot, Brevo, Constant Contact, MailChimp, and others among the most recognizable newsletter tools, all sharing standard features like ready-made templates or performance reports and no-code email design tools.
3. Build Your Newsletter Subscriber List
The easiest way to build an email list is to import your existing subscriber list into your email service. Make sure to enlist your email address to be able to test all newsletter versions until you come up with your perfect email newsletter.
4. Segment Your Contacts for Better Targeting
Bulk newsletter emails have long ceased to work, ending up in the spam folder and damaging your email sender reputation.
Consider segmentation of your contacts to target your audience with personalized messages based on their interests, references, or customer behavior. The more information you know about your subscribers, the more targeted and well-crafted your email marketing newsletter can be.
You can segment your subscribers by:
- Lead magnet. Knowing where your clients came from helps you analyze your lead gen strategies. For instance, if you see that a new subscriber joined as a referral, make sure to send them an email newsletter mentioning their referrer by name and telling them about your best current deals or offers.
- Loyalty. Celebrating milestones with loyal clients is as important as nurturing new ones. It might be a wise choice to create a newsletter specifically for your brand advocates and most loyal subscribers. You can spice things up by offering them a discount or some valuable treat.
- History of purchases. Knowing the history of purchases and interactions with your brand, you can create a newsletter tailored to your customers’ true needs and wants. For instance, if your analytics showed a particular subscriber added a few items to their wishlist, you send an encouraging email..
- Location. Modern technologies allow you to use customers’ location data and personalize ads so that it often looks like a coincidence that they see this particular ad. “Staying in Munich? Come around to see new releases in our local store”. “On vacation in Venice? Don’t miss out on the opportunity to bring home unforgettable souvenirs from our shop.
Electronic newsletters with well-targeted CTAs will stand out with their personal touch, increasing your open rates, click-through rates, and customer satisfaction.
Source: SaleCycle
Always consider your audience in newsletter mailing. Being creative and strategic helps you keep your subscribers engaged and kindle their interest to read your next email newsletter.
5. Create a Newsletter Template
If designing email newsletters manually is not your passion, just drag and drop them using an email building platform. At the same time, think about a catchy title so you can intrigue the recipient with a relevant, mouth-watering message.
A successful newsletter title should be
- Original and creative (cliches never draw attention; they are counterproductive)
- CTA-driven
- Beneficial for subscribers
- Personal (including a subscriber’s name, location, etc.)
The most successful email newsletter titles have between 3 to 5 words, or up to 50 characters, which makes them readable in full on mobile devices.
Don’t forget about visuals. The newsletter needs to draw attention with a well-developed design, a beautiful color scheme, and harmonious text. Don’t overdo it with images or other graphic elements that make an email newsletter patchy. Keep it simple, concise, and elegant.
Source: Sportsdirect
6. Define Your Newsletter Content
The attention-grabbing title is only half the job. You need compelling content for your email newsletter to convert.
When working on newsletter content, keep in mind the following recommendations:
- Personalize. Make them believe you are offering them something no one else can. Tell them about the benefits they will get after buying or subscribing to your email newsletter.
- Sell reasonably. Do not be pushy or imposing when you create a newsletter that sells, especially targeting loyal customers.
- Keep it concise. Make your offer short and sweet, valuing your subscribers’ time. Do not beat around the bush – proceed timely with your core offer.
- Evoke emotions. Make your email newsletter genuine and human-like. People memorize empathic utterances associated with pleasant emotions better than facts (what? where? when?).
Last but not least, think about the right timing of your e-newsletter. Try sending newsletter emails in the morning, when everybody usually checks their inbox, or in the second half of the day when they are less busy.
How To Optimize Your Electronic Newsletters
There is no better suggestion than to test your email newsletter. Watch the statistics after you launch an email newsletter campaign. Examining which strategies work well and which strategies fall flat, doubling down on the former and eliminating the latter.
Here are a few more advice on optimizing your electronic newsletter:
- Update your contact list. Remove those unengaged and invalid emails to avoid wasting your time and efforts. Create a newsletter targeted at inactive subscribers to check whether they are still with you.
- Let them unsubscribe when they want. Simplify the unsubscribing process with an intuitive newsletter design. Place the button at the end of the email newsletter and make it visible so a person skimming a letter can find it.
- Make sure your email newsletter is mobile-friendly. Check how your email looks on different mobile devices so everyone can enjoy the same experience when reading your e-newsletters.
The Best Newsletter Templates in 2023
The internet is full of free and paid email newsletter services with tons of templates that you can choose depending on the type of your business. For example, you can create successful and original newsletters online using ThemeForest, Canva, and Mailchimp. They offer well-crafted templates for specific niches like art, fashion, automobiles, education, and other niches.
Email Newsletter Examples
Netflix
Source: Netflix
The Netflix email newsletter offers a discount in exchange for a subscription renewal. The CTA buttons are marked red to draw the subscriber’s attention to the information. The content includes three movies and TV series one can watch with a Netflix subscription. Overall, the newsletter is concise and visually similar to the Netflix app color theme.
Source: Skyscanner
Skyscanner’s email newsletter features an empowering title, “Your world. Straight into your box,” which is personal and true. The e-newsletter itself resembles the website, with not much information besides a freebie and a catchy title that makes people want to read the rest.
Fitbit
Source: Fitbit
Fitbit newsletter email is similar to Skyscanner’s, with an appealing title and useful information in the linked blog posts. The newsletter is, in fact, a small presentation designed to draw subscribers to the website and make a purchase there.
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