What is an Email Newsletter?
An email newsletter is basically an email used in a marketing campaign. It contains important news and updates to make your audience aware of your brand or products and other significant information. It’s a cost-effective medium used to boost business.
A newsletter opens the door to increase a better understanding and knowledge of your brand and the particular products and services you offer. Advertisements are not enough to reach potential customers, as they have a limited outlook of your products.
Email newsletters can be one of the greatest sources to advertise and promote a new product or service within your brand. Include creative visual posts and proper information on special offers in your promotional campaigns.
A newsletter can help you enhance your target audiences. Place information about the newsletter on your website, and capture information and contact details of new audiences by asking them to subscribe. Know what your prospects are really looking for, and send email newsletters covering some of those important aspects.
Here is how to create an email newsletter (checklist)
1. Choose an email newsletter tool: the first thing to do is to choose an email newsletter tool that fits your budget, goals, and technical skills. Many small business owners still think that sending e-newsletters means compiling a list of email addresses, and then copying and pasting them into the BCC field of a clunky-looking Outlook message.
2. Figure out your newsletter’s goal: Before you start drafting a single word, make sure you’re fully aware of the newsletter’s goal and how it fits into your larger content strategy. Is your newsletter supposed to drive more traffic to your blog? Help you generate leads? Get more email contacts? Send traffic to your website? Or promote new products and services? Figure out your goal and let the rest of your decisions flow from it.
3. Choose a template and gather your content: Once you’ve decided on the goal for your newsletter, you need to sort out how your newsletters are actually going to look. It’s time to choose a template and find content for it. I’d recommend looking into pre-made templates if you’re not familiar with designing emails.
4. Personalize your template: A template is a great starting point, but now it’s time to personalize it. Using a template will give you an idea of how your newsletter will look before writing a copy. That way, you’ll know exactly how much space you have to promote a piece of content. Your template should be mobile-friendly, too. According to data from Litmus, 41.6% of people open their email on a mobile device. Around 25% higher than email opens on the desktop.
5. Set your email newsletter size: It’s important to ensure your newsletter design fits inside that universal 600px width. Your email can be as high as you want it to be without the email client distorting its design.
However, people are likely not to click through to your website if the email goes on forever and email clients with sensitive spam filters might take notice as well. Try not to make your email recipients scroll for more than a second before reaching the end of it.
6. Add in your body content: fill in the template with words and pictures. This will be the meat of your email newsletter. Spend time perfecting it. Most people keep the copy short and sweet to encourage click-throughs.
7. Add in personalization tokens and smart content: the best email that people get are the ones that are personal and can easily be related to. If you want your newsletter to feel personal, you should do the following;
– Segment your emails and choose content that only that group of people will love.
– Add in personalization tokens: this is a really easy thing to implement that could have big results for your conversion rates.
– Add in smart content. This is content that shows one thing to one part of your audience and one thing to another. An example would be a smart call to action, your leads would see a CTA for talking to your sales reps and your customers would see one about getting tickets to a customer-only event.
8. Choose your subject line and sender name: Your audience may like different things, but we’ve found that having a sender name from a real person increased opens and click-throughs. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something recognizable so recipients aren’t confused as to why they’re receiving your email. Lots of things can help you put together a click-worthy subject line, including brevity and an immediately actionable value proposition.
9. Make sure you’re legally compliant: Before you hit “Send,” be sure that your emails are all good from a legal perspective. The two biggest laws you need to worry about? CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
– CAN-SPAM requires that you have a footer in your email with your address and an easy way to unsubscribe from your emails if they don’t want to receive them anymore.
– GDPR is a similar but more comprehensive privacy law that requires (among other things) that email marketers only send newsletters to those people who have manually opted in to receive them.
10. Test different browsers and email providers: Email providers don’t all read email code the same way. What looks fine on Gmail in Chrome might look terrible in Outlook, for example. So you need to test out emails in the most popular browsers and email providers.
11. Send your email: Having made sure all your email recipients have subscribed to receive this email, and your email has all the branding and legal compliance it’s worthy of, it’s time to click send. Then, wait for the data to roll in.
12. Analyze and iterate: Check to see how your email newsletter performed on the goals you set back in step one. See which parts of your email got the most clicks, and which parts of the newsletter contributed most to your goal. If you have closed-loop analytics, measuring this all will be pretty easy.
Creating an email newsletter is one of the most effective ways to provide value to your customers, drive them to buy more products, and encourage them to keep engaging with your brand. Overall, newsletters are a staple in any high-performing email marketing strategy.
