In today’s digital age, where communication happens primarily through emails, social media, and other online platforms, newsletters have become a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their audience.
A well-crafted newsletter can help establish your authority, build customer loyalty, and drive growth for your business.
I’ve been using newsletters for my brand, and it’s a great way to establish a communication channel between you and your audience or community.
This article will guide you through 13 steps to create a successful newsletter for your business.
Table of Contents
13 Steps Creating a Newsletter For Your Business That Grows
1. How can a newsletter help your business grow?
Newsletters offer several benefits to businesses. They give you direct communication with your audience, enabling you to distribute helpful information, news, and promotions.
It can also help you build a loyal customer base by promoting a sense of community and trust.
Newsletters can also drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, and ultimately contribute to your business growth.
2. Define your goals for your email newsletter
Before you start creating your newsletter, defining your goals is essential. Are you aiming to generate leads, advertise new products and services, educate your audience, drive traffic to your websites, or all of the above?
By clarifying your objectives, you can tailor your content and strategy accordingly. It can also help you maintain focus and clarity throughout the newsletter creation process.
In the beginning, set some achievable goals but some long-term objectives. An achievable goal could be to get 50 subscribers in the first month, whereas an objective could be to share a story with your email list over multiple emails.
3. Find a newsletter platform
Creating a newsletter may seem straightforward, but ensuring its successful delivery can be challenging. That’s why it is crucial to have dedicated email marketing tools.
Email newsletter tools can help you simplify your newsletter’s creation and management, provide design and customisation options, ensure deliverability and compliance, offer tracking and analytics, enable automation and scheduling, integrate with other tools, and provide support and resources.
Choose a platform that’s reliable in creating and distributing your email newsletters. But it’s also important you feel comfortable using the platform. There are a significant number of options available, each with its features and pricing plans.
Check out this article on the 11 best newsletter platforms to find the one that suits your business needs.
4. Create a newsletter sign-up form on your website
Create a visible newsletter sign-up form on your website to increase the number of subscribers you have. Keeping the form short and to the point will make it easy for visitors to subscribe. To attract sign-ups, consider providing rewards like exclusive material or discounts.
Don’t wait for readers to come to your newsletter by accident. Actively market it on your website, through social media, and in other ways. To encourage additional sign-ups, develop attractive call-to-action copy and outline the advantages of subscribing.
The sign-up form has the purpose of collecting email addresses, but people are not keen to give their email address away unless they get something in return.
So, to increase your conversion rates for your email sign-up form to grow your email list, you need to give them either a freebie, an e-book or at least show the previous issues of your newsletter. You can also write how many are subscribed at this current date on your email list.
You can also read this blog post for additional advice on efficiently promoting your newsletter.
Here is an example of how I do it on my website.
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5. Create your newsletter strategy
Developing a solid email marketing strategy is vital to a successful newsletter. You will follow this strategy, and it’s combined with your goals and objectives, and it’ll guide your newsletter.
- Audience: Create detailed profiles of your target audience segments, including their characteristics, preferences, pain points, and goals. This will help you tailor your content and messaging to resonate with them.
- Segments: You can divide your subscriber base into smaller segments based on specific criteria such as demographics, behaviour, interests, or engagement levels. This lets you send targeted and relevant content to each segment, increasing engagement and personalisation.
- Content: Decide on the types of newsletter content you will include in your newsletters that align with your audience’s interests and needs.
- Try creating a schedule for your newsletter content to ensure consistency. Add this to your sign-up form as well.
- You can also provide a mix of content formats and topics to keep your newsletters fresh and engaging.
- Decide what types of content you will include, such as industry news, tips and advice, product updates, or customer stories. Add this to your sign-up form to level expectations.
- Combine text, visuals, videos, or infographics to cater to different preferences and optimise information delivery.
- Grow your subscriber base. Create compelling opt-in forms and landing pages on your website or social media platforms to attract new subscribers. Place the forms in multiple places to help grow your newsletter subscribers.
- You can try implementing referral programs to incentivise current subscribers to refer others and ensure a smooth and user-friendly sign-up process.
6. Choose your email template design
Once you’ve determined your newsletter’s objective and strategy, it’s time to select a design and gather content for it. If you are unfamiliar with designing emails, try looking into ready-made templates because they may save time and effort when creating future newsletters.
Make sure to select an email template design that aligns with your brand identity and is easy to read on various devices.
Any newsletter platforms offer a wide range of pre-designed templates to choose from, or you can customise your own.
Overall then, there are 2 types of designs. Either you can go super regular, not use a design and send emails where it looks like a personal email you sat down and wrote.
Secondly, you can find a template from your email marketing software and use this for your emails.
The approach depends on your target audience, so I recommend you test both and measure which delivers the best open and click-through rates.
7. Time to write your newsletter
When crafting your newsletter content, make it informative, relevant, and engaging. Use a conversational tone to connect with your readers and keep paragraphs short and concise.
Incorporate visuals, such as images or videos, to break up the text and make the content more visually appealing.
a. Personalise your newsletter content
Personalisation can significantly impact the effectiveness of your newsletter. Address subscribers by their names, tailor content based on their preferences or purchase history and consider sending segmented newsletters to different subscriber groups.
Personalisation helps create a more personalised and relevant experience for your readers.
b. Set your email newsletter size
While providing valuable content is essential, respecting your readers’ time is equally important. Keep your newsletters concise and focused. Aim for a length that can be read in a few minutes, ensuring the main points are easily digestible.
Normally, newsletters sizes are around 1500-3000 pixels in height and a width of 600-700 pixels. Obviously, the height varies depending on your content length. And you can easily succeed with long newsletters, as long as you’re aligned with your subscribers.
c. Create your body content
Organise your content into sections, using headings and subheadings to improve readability. Include a mix of text, visuals, and links to encourage interaction and drive traffic to your website or landing pages.
Ensure that your content provides value to your readers and aligns with your overall goals and objectives.
But most important, and I can’t stress this enough, you need to provide value. The second your reader doesn’t feel they get value from your newsletter, they’ll unsubscribe.
d. Support both alt text and plain text in your newsletter
Ensure accessibility and compatibility across various email clients and devices, including alternative text (alt text) for your images.
When your newsletter supports both alt text and plain text, you are enhancing accessibility, addressing image rendering issues, improving deliverability, catering to subscribers’ preferences, ensuring content legibility, evading spam filters, and complying with email standards.
This approach enables a broader range of recipients to engage with your newsletter and ensures that your content is accessible and impactful for all subscribers.
e. Choose your subject
Your email subject line is crucial for your subscribers to open your newsletter.
The first thing your recipients see is your subject line, so it creates an initial impression. It will determine whether they will open your email or ignore it, so it must be compelling enough to grab attention and entices them to open it.
When crafting an email subject line, you should consider the following guidelines:
- Use numbers
- Use power words
- Use helpful words
- Avoid negative words
- No longer than 6 words
- No longer than 40 characters
- Use sentence case
Craft a compelling subject line that piques curiosity, communicates value, or creates a sense of urgency. Use free tools like subject line testers to analyse and optimise the effectiveness of your subject lines.
- Test it using free tools. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Email Subject Line Tester by Mailmeteor evaluates an email subject line for free in a matter of seconds. It looks into numerous factors, including length, word count, the number of question marks and exclamation points, emojis, and spam phrases. Make sure your emails correspond to the recipients.
Another tool you can use is Omnisend. Omnisend’s email subject line tester offers you a variety of data to boost your metrics. In addition to a score for the subject line, it first presents character count and wording insights.
I usually run my newsletter subjects through both of these tools, starting with Mailmeteor and then Omnisend to optimise the last parts.
8. Set your send schedule
Consistency is key to maintaining reader engagement. Determine a sending frequency that suits your audience and aligns with your content creation capacity.
Remember that the optimal send schedule may vary depending on your specific audience, industry, and content.
Whether it’s a daily, weekly, or monthly newsletter, establish a regular schedule and stick to it. Even though it might be a bit strange initially with few subscribers, it’ll benefit you in the end.
It’s essential to continuously test, analyse, and adapt your send schedule to ensure it aligns with your goals, keeps subscribers engaged, and maximises the effectiveness of your email newsletter campaigns.
9. Ensure compliance
When sending newsletters, it’s crucial to promptly comply with email marketing regulations, including an unsubscribe link and honouring opt-out requests.
Remember to ensure that your unsubscribe process is user-friendly and easily accessible. The unsubscribe link should be visible in your newsletter, ideally at the email’s bottom.
You can maintain compliance, build trust, and foster positive relationships with subscribers by providing an easy and transparent opt-out option.
You should also familiarise yourself with the laws and regulations applicable to your region to avoid legal issues.
10. Test it in different browsers and email providers
Before sending out your newsletter, test it thoroughly across browsers, email clients, and devices. Pay attention to formatting, links, images, and overall readability.
This ensures your newsletter is visually appealing, functional, accessible, and compatible with various platforms and devices, leading to higher engagement, better user experience, and improved campaign performance.
You can try running an automated pre-send Litmus Test to check how your email looks in different email clients and on different devices.
You can also maximise the result of every email by confirming that the content is accessible to subscribers of all abilities—including those with colour vision deficiency.
11. Send it out
Once you have reviewed and tested your newsletter, it’s time to hit the send button. Double-check all the recipients, the subject line, and the content before scheduling or sending the newsletter.
Use your email marketing tools or newsletter platform to schedule the send date and time.
Bonus tip: Some email marketing tools allow you to schedule it for your receivers’ timezone. This increases your open rate significantly.
12. Analyse your analytics
Analysing newsletter analytics after sending it out is a crucial step to assessing the performance and effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to gauge the effectiveness of your newsletter and make data-driven improvements in the future.
Analysing your analytics also provides valuable insights that inform strategic decisions, optimise performance, and drive continuous improvement.
By leveraging this data, you can refine your content, target your audience more effectively, and achieve tremendous success with your newsletter campaigns.
Use this data to set goals as well. If you achieved an open rate of 22%, your next goal could be to achieve an open rate of 24%. The same goes for the click-through rate.
13. A/B test in the future
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a valuable technique for optimising your newsletter in the future. It allows you to make decisions based on data rather than assumptions or guesswork.
Consider conducting A/B tests with different subject lines, content formats, or calls-to-action to optimise your newsletter’s performance. After performing those strategies, you can determine which ones yield the best outcomes.
Experimenting and analysing the results will also help refine your newsletter strategy. This iterative process enables you to deliver tailored newsletters to your audience, maximise engagement, and achieve your desired goals.
Bonus: Clean your email list
This is a step many forget, and it’s hurting their email sender’s reputation and, in the end, your spam score.
You need to clean your email list from spam accounts and especially spam trap accounts.
Internet service providers have bots that sign up for various newsletters, including yours. And they do it to test your sender reputation and if you follow email marketing guidelines.
There are 4 methods on how you can do it. Often it’s built into your email marketing tool. Read about the 4 methods here.
Conclusion
Creating a successful newsletter for your business requires careful planning, attention to detail, and focusing on your audience’s needs and preferences. Following the 13 steps outlined in this article, you can create a newsletter that grows your business and strengthens your connection with your email recipients.
Creating a newsletter might be overwhelming initially, but you’ll surely get used to it. And having a guide like this article to help you build an email marketing campaign targeting potential customers or newsletter subscribers is the best option.
These guidelines will help you start and create an email newsletter, especially if you don’t have extensive knowledge yet of newsletters. And they’ll help you grow your email newsletter list as well.
If you want to learn how to promote your newsletter, then you can read about that here.
