To create effective email newsletters, you need good content tailored to your audience. The newsletter content can be entertaining, educational, persuasive, or purposeful.
The secret to successful email marketing is segmenting your audience. Even if you have a great article entirely irrelevant to your recipients, you waste time. Make sure you are sending the appropriate message to the right person.
Here are some basic steps you can take to write a good email newsletter:
Step 1: Define the goal of your newsletter
What do you want to accomplish with your newsletters? What is the objective of your marketing efforts? Answering these questions is critical.
- Do you want recipients to buy something?
- Do you want to develop trust with them?
- Do you want to educate your readers?
The content of your email newsletter must align with these goals. If you want to convey expertise in your field, send high-quality articles. If you want to increase sales, send irresistible offers.
Step 2: Use an editorial newsletter calendar
Why not steal this great idea from content editors? It’s an excellent tool for organizing your emails by content, date, topic, etc.
The foundation of a good newsletter strategy is planning. Brainstorm with your colleagues, and ask them what new features or events are coming up and what could be newsworthy. Plan your newsletters for the next two to three months to be aware of any upcoming events, product updates, or promotions that you can include in your emails.
This strategy will prevent last-minute disasters, give you a convenient way to create your email newsletters, and prevent you from sending out random, unstructured emails.
Step 3: Dedicate each email to a specific topic
It cannot be evident when several different topics are in one email. Combine the same topics into one email and reference it in the subject line.
Once you have a subject in mind, create a framework that you can use. Develop a spreadsheet where you can track your campaigns and their success.
Create columns for the most critical information.
- Date
- Topic
- Assigned
- Status
- Subject line
- Link to email
- Objective
- Persona
- List
- Link to image
- Landing Page
- A/B test variants
- Result of the A/B test
Step 4: Design catchy subject lines
A good newsletter begins with a good subject line. We receive so many emails every day that we get overwhelmed by them. Because of this, we ignore the ones that are not important.
Your job is to make people think your email is essential and relevant to them.
Use the 4U method when writing the text of your title.
- urgent
- unique
- highly specific
- useful
This technique is very effective if you use it correctly. Make the audience think we need to open your email or will miss it. Even if the recipient has the purpose of returning to your email after seeing your subject lines, they won’t. So make them understand that they need to act as soon as possible.
Be unique and stand out to grab your audience’s attention. Also, ensure your message is clear and adds value.
Keep your subject lines under 50 characters.
Email clients display a different number of characters. By doing this, your email subscribers can read the whole sentence. You can use that details to optimize your subject line if you know what devices your readers use.
Don’t use capital letters or spammy words like “free” or “discount,” or you’ll end up in the recipient’s junk folder. Use good old A/B testing to determine which subject lines result in a higher open rate and which content is engaging enough to drive visitors to your homepage.
Step 5: Design a beautiful newsletter template
It’s a smart move to create a beautiful email template that you can use repeatedly. That will save you time and ensure that the layout is consistent.
We suggest using a professional email template designer as it offers a flexible drag-and-drop editor. You can use many built-in templates, but you can also create a guide for this purpose to create a custom and branded layout with an email builder.
Step 6: Start writing your newsletter
First, you need to choose whether you wish to send plain text or HTML emails.
You can analyze different metrics like click-through rate or conversion rate. If you select the former, you can have a more personal conversation. HTML emails, on the other hand, allow you to be creative. They lead to a higher conversion rate and can be tracked.
You can also select a minimal, text-like HTML email with a straightforward design but still takes advantage of the tracking capabilities that HTML emails offer. Start by greeting your readers by their first name, if that’s possible.
Depending on the content of your email newsletter, you can use different opening lines:
- We hope you are well
- I hope you are well
- Here’s our weekly newsletter to keep you in the loop
- Step 7: Share valuable content
Newsletters are there to share the news. It would be great to make sure that the news you want to share is valuable to your readers.
You can use a few questions to determine if the content you want to share is valuable.
- Timing: Did it happen recently?
- Relevance: Is it something your audience will be interested in and valuable?
- Progression: Is it related to your product development?
Don’t sell aggressively.
Keep the good old 90/10% ratio. These days, people don’t want to be sold. They will unsubscribe as soon as they feel you are pushing your product too much.
- 10% advertising is more than enough in newsletters.
- Use simple language and short sentences.
People don’t have time to read complicated and long sentences. Make your content easy to digest.
Keep your sentences between 10 and 12 words and avoid the passive voice. It also makes your text hard to read. And you’re not writing an academic paper, after all. You are your readers’ friend; speak to them accordingly.
Don’t use technical jargon, and your audience may not understand it. Describe everything in detail, you are the expert, and your readers want to learn from you.
Step 8: Put three to six topics in a newsletter
If you use images in your emails, don’t include more than three posts. Make your newsletters short and sweet.
When it comes to content formats, let your creativity run wild:
- Photos
- Blog posts
- Reviews
- Contests
- Corporate news
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Offer
Do not forget to provide links to your website and products. Nothing is more annoying than a desperate click on a link that doesn’t work. And you could also lose valuable conversions.
Step 9: Check your grammar
Even if the body of your email is short, you should double-check your grammar. We all make mistakes from time to time. Therefore, don’t mess up your newsletter.
Check the email list you send newsletters to. Ensure every link works and points to the correct URL. Remember, relevancy is critical.
Step 10: Send the newsletter, but do not stop there
Return in three days and evaluate the data. If you find that some recipients did not open your emails, send them again with various subject lines.
Step 11: Track the metrics that assist you in reaching your objective
That is when your marketing goals come into play. You can quickly determine if you’ve met your goals if you know your KPI.
Note down the following metrics in a spreadsheet to see how your projects perform over time.
- Total emails sent
- Emails delivered
- Total open rate/open rate
- Total clicks/click-through rate
- Conversion
What was the goal? To increase conversion? Then let’s see the number of people converted via email.
If the campaign’s purpose was to drive traffic to the website, check your website analytics. Did the number of visitors increase? What about the bounce rate? Is it at 50%? Then that’s great!
Step 12: Test the most effective time to send your emails
There is no magic formula for the right time to send your newsletters. It depends on your target audience. Find out what works for them.
Your newsletters need to be sent regularly because your audience expects them to arrive. If you promise to send emails on Tuesdays, stick to it. Otherwise, you won’t come across as trustworthy.
Experiment with different send times to see when your recipients are most active and most likely to convert.
Step 13: Don’t send email newsletters too often or too infrequently
Make sure your audience doesn’t forget about you but don’t annoy them either. In most cases, a daily newsletter would be too much.
I think there is a golden rule you can follow. Send newsletters when you have something to say. If you do not have the time and resources, don’t put yourself in an awkward situation where you’re pressuring yourself to send emails. You can send out a weekly newsletter if you have a blog but don’t want to sell.
Quality over quantity is always better
That is why we only send weekly newsletters to our target audience. Our emails always contain our latest article, usually about email marketing or email design.
Bi-weekly newsletters are probably the most convenient. They require fewer resources and are no hassle at all. The perfect method for businesses that still sell primarily offline.
if you want even more great blogs, check out our My Blog Poster We have a lot of related blogs to help you and If you want help with your email marketing get in touch with us at My Blog Poster we can do it for you.