What is a newsletter and how do you create one?
Today, online marketing is an integral part of the business strategy of practically every company, and a newsletter is one of its key building blocks. Despite the frequent claim that it's an outdated method and nobody reads emails any more, email marketing remains important and continues to attract strong interest. You could even say it's a key tool for building brand recognition, improving sales results and generating profit. There are many benefits to this form of communication, but let's start with the basics: what is a newsletter? How do you create a newsletter? What steps should you take to make full use of it and meet your readers' expectations?
What is a newsletter?
Newsletters are regular email messages sent to a specific group of people who have agreed to receive such messages from a given company. They let you communicate with potential and existing customers by sharing information about offers, promotions, news or other content tailored to a specific industry. Their effectiveness depends on many factors, from well-chosen content, through visual design, to subscriber segmentation and result analysis.
Why is a newsletter important in marketing?
- Direct contact with your audience: A newsletter allows direct, regular contact, which helps you maintain a constant presence in your audience's mind.
- Building engagement and lasting relationships: A newsletter lets you build engagement by delivering valuable content and information. As a result, readers become more interested in the company's activities, interact with it more often and develop an emotional bond with the brand. Loyalty matters a great deal for long-term success, because such readers are more likely to recommend the brand to others, which translates into higher reputation and revenue.
- Effectiveness in conversions: Mailings can include specific calls to action, encouraging desired actions such as purchases, signing up on a website, or taking part in promotional campaigns. This lets a company effectively generate sales and reach its marketing goals.
- Data analysis: This lets you better understand your audience. By monitoring their reactions to content and tracking the most important metrics, a sender can adapt their marketing strategy to needs and preferences, increasing the effectiveness of their activities.
How do you create a newsletter?
To build an effective newsletter, you need to go through several stages. The first is defining the goals you want to achieve with it. If you struggle to set them, use the SMART method, which says goals should be specific, measurable, relevant, achievable and time-bound.
Next, it's worth precisely defining your audience. Who are the potential readers of your messages? What are their needs, preferences and expectations? The better you understand your target group, the easier it will be to provide content that interests them and convinces them to stay on your list.
Define their demographics, learn their interests and analyse their behaviour. It can also help to research competitors, which can provide valuable clues about which market segments have the most potential. Remember that defining your target audience is often an iterative process. Monitor results on an ongoing basis and check whether your content is attracting the right readers. If it isn't, adjust your strategy.
The next stage is thinking about what actions you want readers to take. This could be clicking a link to a product, filling in a form, downloading free content or making a purchase. Do you want to increase sales, build customer loyalty, inform people about company news, or share valuable knowledge in a given field? This question is crucial, because your goals determine what content you create and how you'll measure the newsletter's success. Make sure the goals you choose are measurable. That means you'll be able to track campaign results and assess whether you achieved them. Use the reporting panel available on your email marketing platform.
An important step is choosing the right email marketing platform. There are many solutions on the market; examples include Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Mailerlite or, among more advanced options, ExpertSender. The choice depends on your needs and budget, but it's worth paying attention to several important factors that will affect the effectiveness of your campaigns and your comfort while working:
- Available features: The platform should let you create and personalise newsletters, manage your contact list, segment your audience, automate sends, run A/B tests, and report on and analyse results. The more features available on the platform, the better you'll be able to tailor your campaigns to your needs and goals.
- Integrations: Make sure the platform integrates with other software you use, such as your CRM, e-commerce systems, or data-analysis tools. Integrations make it easier to move data between different systems and optimise your work.
- Audience segmentation: This lets you prepare more personalised content. Make sure the platform lets you build segments based on different criteria, such as demographics, behaviour, interactions or purchase history.
- Automations: These let you prepare messages that respond to specific behaviour from a given group of recipients, such as welcome messages, abandoned-cart messages, re-engagement messages and so on. Check whether the platform offers the ability to create multi-step automations.
- Technical help and support: It's important that the platform provides access to technical help and support. Make sure you can count on a fast response to any questions or problems.
- Pricing and payment terms: Compare the prices of different platforms and consider your financial options. Prices can be based on the number of contacts, the number of messages sent, or other criteria. Check whether the platform offers a free trial version and what the costs are for plans with additional features.
- Deliverability: This is a key factor for success in email marketing. Make sure the platform takes care to get your messages into inboxes, rather than landing in the SPAM folder.
- Clear interface: Choose a platform with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. This will significantly ease your work and shorten the time needed to learn how to use it.
Gaining subscribers
To send a newsletter, you need a mailing list. There are many ways to collect email addresses, but the most important thing is to act in accordance with data-protection regulations such as GDPR. It's also key to make it easy to unsubscribe from every newsletter. Remember that the key to effectively building your audience list is offering valuable content and encouraging sign-ups through various channels and opportunities. How can you do this?
Put a sign-up form in a visible place on your website. This could be in the footer, in a sidebar, on the homepage, or as a pop-up. Collect data in it that will be useful, such as first and last name, of course an email address, or a date of birth. Make sure you encourage visitors to sign up by offering something valuable in return, for example a free ebook, a discount code, or access to exclusive content.
If you run an online store, add a newsletter sign-up option on the order confirmation page or on the product page, which will let you collect email addresses from customers who make purchases. You can also create a dedicated landing page with a dedicated form that promotes specific offers or content. Landing pages can be used for ad campaigns and other marketing activities.
Promote your newsletter on social media and encourage your followers to sign up, and ask your current subscribers to recommend the newsletter to friends. You can add a note like this at the end of every issue.
Designing a newsletter
Another important step is the design. It should have a clear visual layout, be visually appealing and suited to your audience. You can use ready-made templates or create your own, but in either case remember to create newsletter designs that are visually consistent, so readers instantly recognise the sender: use colours, fonts and graphics that match your brand identity, and place your logo in a visible spot.
Be sure to keep a readable layout that guides the reader through the content. Put the most important information at the top, use appropriate headings, paragraphs and lists to make reading easier, and avoid too many elements that could distract attention. Make sure the newsletter is responsive and adapts to different mobile devices (computers, tablets, smartphones), and that images and graphics are good quality and, above all, optimised, to avoid long loading times for the newsletter. It's also worth adding alt text to them.
Creating content
Now it's time to create the newsletter's content. The content should be valuable to readers and matched to the goals you defined at the start. It's important that the subject line is clear and appealing, since it needs to grab attention and encourage people to open the message. Even at this stage, you can add personalisation and address your reader by name. Content should be appealing and easy to read: avoid overly long text and too many graphics, and keep a clear structure that includes a call to action (CTA), a prompt that clearly tells the reader what to do next, for example "Buy now" or "Sign up". If you've created different segments split by target group, tailor the content to their needs and interests.
Don't forget to include contact information and an unsubscribe option at the bottom of the message, in line with legal requirements.
Scheduling and send frequency
Scheduling is a key element of an effective newsletter campaign. Decide when and how often you'll send your newsletter. Frequency depends on your goals and your ability to create content, but avoid overwhelming subscribers with too many messages, since this can lead to a high unsubscribe rate or your messages being marked as spam. That said, don't forget about regularity either.
Make sure to pay attention to feedback, and adjust your strategy to what your readers expect from you.
Checking and testing
Before sending a message, you need to thoroughly check its content and appearance on different devices; make sure the message template is responsive and adapts to different screen sizes. This is crucial, since more and more people read messages on smartphones and tablets. Also test different email clients, checking how your messages look and behave in clients such as Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and so on. Each client can interpret HTML code slightly differently, so it's important to make sure everything works correctly.
It's also worth testing different variants to increase open rates and improve conversion results. You can do this by running A/B tests, where you set different send days and times, subject lines or content layouts.
Before sending a campaign, be sure to send a test to your own address. This lets you make a final check that everything works correctly, for example that everything is properly linked and leads to the right place, and that images are optimised and don't slow down the email's loading. Additionally, run spam tests to make sure the message won't be flagged as spam. Avoid words and phrases often associated with spam, and avoid overly aggressive marketing techniques.
Analysing results
The last, but no less important, step is analysing the results of your newsletter campaigns. This is a key stage in improving your email marketing strategy and achieving better results.
Monitor key metrics
- Open rate tells you how many people opened your message. If it's low, it may mean the subject line isn't appealing enough, or the message landed in the spam folder.
- Click-through rate measures how many people clicked links or buttons in your message. This is an important metric, since it shows which content and links were most appealing to readers.
- If the goal of a campaign is to persuade readers to take a specific action, such as buying a product, signing up for a webinar, or downloading an ebook, monitor the conversion rate. This metric shows how effectively your messages lead to the desired actions.
- Unsubscribe rate shows how many people decided to unsubscribe after receiving your message. Try to understand why they're unsubscribing and adjust your strategy to reduce this number.
Use analytics tools
- Use tools such as Google Analytics or the built-in analytics features on your email marketing platform.
Analyse on-site interactions
- If your messages lead to specific pages on your website, track user interactions on those pages. Check how much time they spend on the site, what actions they take, and whether they achieve the goals you set.
Analysis period
- Choose an appropriate analysis period. This could be monthly, quarterly or annual, depending on your needs and business cycle.
Summary
A newsletter is a powerful marketing tool that lets your brand communicate effectively with its audience and promote its products or services. However, its effectiveness depends on proper planning, creating valuable content, and analysing results. That's why it's worth taking care over every stage of building your own newsletter, to achieve the results you want and increase sales.
It's worth remembering that email marketing is constantly evolving, so it's important to stay flexible and open to experimentation, adapting your strategy to the changing needs and expectations of your readers.
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