If you are here to create an email newsletter of your own, or keen to know how it works for your business, you're at the right place. Whether you are a newbie or you want to make sure you are designing the newsletter correctly, we have got you covered in this article.
Let’s begin with the basics!
What is an email newsletter?
An email newsletter is an email that offers interesting content to the subscribers. This includes company announcements, promotions, relevant blogs, ebooks, solicit feedback or upcoming events. Email newsletters engage your audience by keeping them in the loop and also by improving the website traffic.
Image Credits: Moz
The chances are that newsletters have already become a part of your internet life. In fact, you may see at least a few of them on a weekly basis. This popularity of newsletter is expected to surge in the future because of its effectiveness.
However, just sending a newsletter for the sake of filling your marketing roadmap will not do any good for your campaign objectives. Your newsletter is a beneficial resource, and it’s crucial to learn the tricks of this trade as early as possible. This article helps you in this area by digging deeper into its creation process.
Steps to Create an Engaging Email Newsletter
Once you understand the importance and the concept of the newsletter and know what you truly want to focus on, it’s time to start assembling it. If you are worried that it requires loads of time to craft hundreds or thousands of it, you will be pleased to know that this process is fairly straight-forward.
Just follow the steps mentioned below to create an awe-inspiring newsletter for your upcoming campaign.
1. Identify the reason behind creating a newsletter
Before proceeding with the newsletter creation process, I would like to ask: Is it essential for your business, or will it help you boost sales rate in your target market? If it isn’t right for your business, you shouldn’t waste your time working on one.
You can find the answer to the above questions by analyzing your industry practices, past success rates, and business goals. These include:
- Are there any successful email newsletter that your target audience would like to subscribe to?
- What does any successful newsletter consist of?
- Do you think you can be successful by employing the resources available to you – time, budget, and internal support?
- Will it help you increase the number of leads, close more deals, and retain more customers?
If you think your industry isn’t really interested in email newsletters or haven’t achieved any specific goals associated with campaigns, you can better invest your time in creating something else, such as publishing blogs, whitepapers, or FAQs for your website.
In case you have found that the email newsletter works fine for your industry and you should create one, follow the next steps.
2. Figure out the content type your subscribers would love to receive
People usually unsubscribe from your list if they think your message is irrelevant. Hence it would be best if you stay on topic at all times, while also learning the interest of your customers. For example, if you are into the business of fashion accessories, you shouldn’t be talking about politics, local weather, or health tips. It’s unrelated to your business, and it’s not what your readers want to know about.
Direct marketing agency Epsilon studied over 4,000 consumers in 13 countries to reveal the most often-cited reason for people unsubscribing from email lists.
Image Credits: Epsilon
One way to deliver the most relevant content is by analyzing your existing email list and predicting their purchasing behaviour. Although this tactic works best for most of the industries, overlooking the inaccuracies in your list may further complicate the process. You may send out well-curated content for those who did not exhibit any interest in your product or services.
Such problems can be eliminated by discarding invalid or inaccurate records and appending valid emails to your existing database.
Another way to learn the subscriber’s interest is by letting them choose what they want to read. Besides, they can also decide how often they want to hear from you. These strategies are worth trying because your conversion rates will be much higher when you send out only relevant content.
3. Keep your newsletter content educational and less promotional
Your subscriber doesn't always want to hear about your upcoming products or its features. Get rid of the promotional content once in a while and focus on sending only educational, relevant, and timely information. We live in the information age, and the educational content is what draws the prospect to your site and converts them into leads.
Educational content could be any of the following:
- Educating about your process: At a particular stage down the sales funnel, your customers might question your operation, such as “How do you gather the information?” or “How does your product work?” Although a part of it will be handled in sales calls, a well-curated content can reassure the faith of prospective customers on your brand.
Image Credits: Coinbase
Coinbase makes its product concept easy to understand by sending out an introductory email to the subscribers.
- Educating about some useful topics: By teaching your customers something new, you can reinforce the existing relationship with them. However, make sure it is related to your business. Framebridge does the same by teaching readers a helpful skill of hanging your art.
Image Credits: Framebridge
4. Keep your email newsletter creative and minimal
Do you use a dull subject line for your newsletter? Let’s face the truth - those subject lines don’t interest your subscriber anymore. They get old quickly in this rapidly evolving world. A better approach would be to try a creative and engaging subject line for each email you put out.
This rule also holds for your newsletter content. Your level of creativity improves the email click-through rates in no time.
Besides creativity, the closing is arguably the most crucial element of an email. It says whether a reader will act on your email or not. You can provide this closure using CTA, or call-to-action buttons. It could be a message to check your product page, download an ebook, or straight-up buy a product. No matter the case, always make sure your CTA is crystal clear.
A newsletter from The Skimm is an excellent example here. Their newsletters cover exciting topics in an appealing, casual, and digestible way.
Image Credits: The Skimm
And don't forget, use visuals to enhance the readability of your newsletter, similar to the one shown in the above example. You need to understand that your readers will not love to read every word in your email. An average subscriber spends 51 seconds reading a newsletter, and they read only about 19% of the text in it. So, it’s advisable to include visuals in it to make it easy for people to scan through your message.
5. Lastly, test your email newsletter without fail
Testing allows you to monitor different elements of your email and its impact on subscribers.
Consider an example of Campaign Monitor. The company runs a few tests to increase the email campaign click-through rates. With simple segmentation and custom imagery, it saw a 13% increase in click-through rate, which further prompted them to test more elements. Their next test resulted in a 127% rise in click-through. That sounds great, right?
Now we know the benefits of testing the newsletter. Let’s examine five things that need to be tested to reap better outcomes:
- Subject line
- Pre-header
- Time of day to send an email
- CTA
- Content
Study the outcome of these tests to gain a ton of actionable insights that can directly impact your campaign performance.
It’s Time to Hit the Send Button
If you're worried that people’s inboxes are already stuffed with hundreds of unread messages, and your message has no space to fit in there, you are mistaken. Your subscribers will always find a room for your email, if it’s well-written, relevant, engaging, and provides real value to them. So, without worrying any further, send out an excellent email newsletter that will benefit both you and your subscriber.
