Creating an email newsletter is one of the most effective ways to provide value to your customers, drive them to buy more products, and encourage them to keep engaging with your brand.

Overall, newsletters are a staple in any high-performing email marketing strategy. The purpose is to create an email that provokes specific actions while promoting a specific product or service, either to educate consumers or to offer them something new.

Steps to create a newsletter

Choose your tool 

Choose an email newsletter tool that fits your budget, goals, and technical skills, this are marketing automation softwares for small-to-enterprise businesses. The email newsletter tool is easy to use, especially if you have experience using drag-and-drop page editors on a content management system.

Set your goal

Before you start drafting a single word, make sure you’re fully aware of the newsletter’s goal and how it fits into your larger content strategy. Setting the goal will guide the rest of your decisions.  Keep in mind that your KPIs should go beyond “how many people opened it”.

Choose the template

Depending on how early you set your newsletter’s goal and how often you plan on sending it, you could be able to actively or passively find content in the time between two email sends. Active means you’re going on the hunt for content that’ll solve a specific goal. Passive means that you’ll randomly stumble on it when browsing for other content, but realize it could fit in nicely.

Personalize your template

Using a template will give you an idea of how your newsletter will look before sending it. That way, you’ll know exactly how much space you need, because there are a few things more frustrating than trying to squeeze content into a tight a space. The design just needs to make it easy for your recipients to read, scan, and click. This means it should be mobile-friendly, too.

Tips to personalize your newsletter

The best email newsletters you get feel like they’ve been written personally for you. Like a friend actually took the time to put together a newsletter with things only you would like. You open them, you click on them, you share them … pretty much every time. So, a few final tips are:

  • Segment your emails and choose content that only that group of people will love.

  • If your marketing software supports personalization, tokens are a really easy thing to implement that could have big results for your conversion rates. That being said, only add in a few personalization tokens, you don’t want to creep out your email recipients.

  • Add smart content! This is content that shows one thing to one part of your audience and one thing to another. An example would be a smart CTA. Your leads would see a CTA for talking to your sales reps and your customers would see one about getting tickets to a customer-only event. Neither audience would want to see the other audience’s CTA, so smart content will show only the right CTA to the right person.

Email newsletters are a critical part of any scalable email marketing strategy. With the steps above, you’ll be sure to create a winning email newsletter that will help you convert more leads and grow your business. If you have any doubt about the process or how to create a successful email newsletter, do not hesitate to contact us.