How To Create An Email Newsletter In 8 Steps

Wondering how to create an email newsletter?

For businesses, an email newsletter is the most powerful strategical tactic. You can keep nurturing your leads and clients, increase sales, and build brand awareness.

It also provides news, tips, useful information, that can help solve problems to your clients.

If your goal is to convert leads into clients, when creating your Digital Marketing Plan, email marketing should be one of the main strategies.

What’s an Email Newsletter?

An email newsletter is an email that you send to your subscribers periodically to keep them informed about the latest news, useful tips and updates about your products or services.

The main purpose of an email newsletter is to keep your customers motivated. And to do so with the purpose that they will take some form of action, sooner or later.

Are Email Newsletters That Effective?

The following stats show some evidence:

How To Create An Email Newsletter In 8 Steps

To help you get started, we share the 8 steps on how to create an email that people actually read.

Step # 1 Determine your email marketing goals

The first question you should ask yourself is: Does my company really need a newsletter?

Evaluate your resources and the likelihood of the audience interested in them. Better to give a well thought before you start than wasting your time and money.

If you decide to go for it, you’ll need to create a plan.

Successful newsletters are goal-oriented. We cannot emphasize much how crucial it is to elaborate an email marketing plan for your company’s success.

1. Find out the newsletter goals – Nurturing customers, generate web traffic, etc.
2. Determine your target audience – Create buyer personas.
3. Decide the type of content you are going to create and share
4. Newsletters frequency
5. The real value your subscribers get

Step # 2 Choose a newsletter service provider

There are still many small businesses who send emails to their customers the old way. That is, compiling a list of email addresses, and then copying and pasting them into the BCC field.

If you want to create a professional-looking newsletter, get advantage of email marketing features as autoresponders, split testing or customer journey automations, then you have to use an email marketing service provider.

List of email marketing service providers:

1. Hubspot – CRM and email marketing.
2. ActiveCampaign – marketing automation with CRM.
3. Mailchimp – email marketing tool and ecommerce automation.
4. Maropost – email marketing and automation.
5. Keap – email marketing.
6. Benchmark Email – email marketing tool and automation.
7. Get Response – email marketing tool and automation
8. Acumbamail – email marketing
9. Kajabi – automation.

Step # 3 Set up your newsletter email list and subscription form

You don’t need to be tech-savvy to create a newsletter email list and subscription form with any of the email services providers listed above.

Yet, you need to comply with the 100% opt-in.

What does this mean?

It means that, by law (GDPR), you cannot send emails to users who haven’t given their consent to do so (mostly through a sign-up form on your website).

If you already have a list of customers who have given their permission to receive emails from you, you can import that list of subscribers to the email service provider.

Step # 4 Decide the content plan (80% educational, 20% promotional)

First, you’ll need to provide a great value if you want to attract and keep readers. This is key, since your email marketing efforts depend mostly on the value you give.
What types of content we can share in an email newsletter?

1. Blog Posts – Either their content or a list of the most popular.
2. Latest news on your field.
3. Company updates
4. How-to guides
5. Checklists
6. Templates
7. Discounts and promotions
8. Giveaways
9. Testimonials
10. Webinars
11. Video Marketing Content

Step # 5 Create a clean design

After content, design is an important element of a newsletter. You want people to read them, and don’t get them to unsubscribe because of a sloppy look.

Useful tips to keep in mind:

• Don’t forget the branding: color, font, logo, etc.
• Use high-resolution photos and videos.
• Mobile-friendly.
• Keep a consistent style.

Either you can design it with a template in the same app or design a professional quality newsletter with Canva’s free online editor.

Step # 6 Test, test, test

You don’t need to have a large subscription list and create a mass campaign to start testing.

You can create an A/B testing newsletters to evaluate email subject lines, for instance. Now, when testing, we advise you to create two different versions of the same newsletter with only one different element. In this case, the two versions will be the same except for the email subject lines.

This approach will help you better analyze what works and what doesn’t.

Step #7 Market your newsletter

For people to read your newsletter, you will need subscribers.

There are many strategic tactics on how to build a subscriber list. Here, we share some of them:

• Share links of your old newsletters on your website. People can get an idea of what they can get if they subscribe.
• You can highlight it as an Instagram Story, and users can check it out when visiting your Instagram profile.
• Insert a URL on your book that readers can easily find where to subscribe.
• Create banner ads online.

Related Content: 20 Lead Magnet Ideas To Increase Subscribers

Step #8 Measure results and iterate

Data helps you understand what works and what doesn’t work.

Keep in mind that data and information are not the same thing.

First, you need to collect the data. Don’t worry, the email service provider will give it to you.

Second, you need to understand the data.

You can start with two key indicators: Open rate and Click-through rate.

Best Tips on how to create a newsletter:

1. Be consistent. Don’t expect any results if you send an email newsletter without a plan.
2. Include only one call to action. Don’t get your subscribers dispersed with different actions. For better results, be clear on the main action you want them to take.
3. Ask your subscribers. Feedback can be very useful. Try to not bombard them with questions every single day!
4. Include great copy. We talk about design. No need to remind you that you must create compelling content. Incorporate trending keywords. Use Google Keyword Planner.
5. Be creative. One thing is to check other newsletters to get inspired from and, the other is to copy them.
6. Make them shareable. This is another awesome tip on how to market it.

Conclusion

With the steps above, you can now create an email newsletter that will help you achieve your goals.

An email marketing strategy is a conversion key strategy in a Digital Marketing Plan. Let us know if you need any help. We will be pleased to help you.