How to Create an Outstanding Email Newsletter for Your Audience — Tips & Tricks

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An email newsletter is a fantastic marketing method for engaging with your subscribers and driving them to perform an action that suits your business needs. It can connect you with your users in many different ways if it’s done properly. A messy, unattractive, and inconsistent newsletter won’t hold anyone’s attention, even if it contains some of your best offers and content.

Creating an email newsletter is commonly a part of an extensive marketing strategy. This means that you need to set your primary goals and apply them across all your marketing efforts. The CTAs and links in your newsletter lead to your website, blog, social media channels, etc. The journey needs to be consistent and without any unpleasant surprises that might ruin user experience.

If you’ve got a top-notch newsletter, it can:

• Boost your revenue

• Drive more people to subscribe to your mailing list

• Bring you a significantly better return on investment

• Ensure that your website and social media channels have constant traffic

In this article, we are going to show you how to create a newsletter that can achieve impressive results by providing some of the best tips and tricks used by professional marketers. The practices we’re going to cover are:

1. Providing high-quality content

2. Designing your email newsletter

3. Testing your email newsletter

4. Sending your email newsletter more efficiently

How to Provide High Quality Content

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Providing top-notch content in your newsletter is about more than just writing a good copy. You need to properly organize and pay close attention to everything that your recipients are going to read. Content and design go hand-in-hand — they need to complement each other. Keep in mind that even the smallest of details matter.

Start With the Subject Line and Sender Name

The email subject line is one of the most important aspects of any email. It’s the first line of text that your recipients see so it has to be compelling and leave a strong first impression. According to Invesp’s report, 47% of all email opens and 69% of spam reports are based on subject lines. If they aren’t clickable and seem spammy, most of your contacts won’t even get to see all the effort you put into your newsletter.

The subject line has to be creative and original. You want to intrigue your audience and make them curious about what’s inside the email. There are a couple of approaches that you can try out:

Keep in mind that your emails are going to be read on different devices. You mustn't forget about mobile users since they make at least half of your audience. Make sure that you don’t go over 50 characters because the subject line might get cut off. If that happens, its message might be lost on the reader, or it may look like you didn’t care.

The sender name also matters because people tend to dismiss emails that sound like they’re coming from a random source they know nothing about. If your brand is popular enough, they will probably recognize it and trust you. If you are running a startup, you will get better results by using a person’s name. 

Personalize Your Content

Content personalization matters because every subscriber loves being treated as an individual. To do this properly, you can segment your list by relevant factors, including:

1. Demographic factors — age, sex, gender, and ethnicity

2. Psychographic factors — values, interests, opinions, and attitudes

3. Firmographic factors — industry, revenue, and job title

4. Behavioral factors — brand interactions and purchasing habits 

When you’ve got lists based on particular parameters, you can create custom campaigns for every contact group. Segmentation can help you determine when it’s appropriate to share information about an upcoming sale, provide rewards for previous purchases, ask subscribers to spread the word about your brand, etc. You can also focus on your open rates, and customize your emails for those groups.

Choose the Right Type of Content

Depending on your target audience, there are a few approaches that you can take with your content, such as:

1. Interviewing a thought leader

2. Featuring loyal subscribers

3. Repurposing your evergreen content

If you can get a hold of an industry expert, you can interview them to provide your audience with a new and interesting perspective on a compelling subject. It’s an effective solution for educating, entertaining, and engaging with your subscribers. If you ask them to share the interview on their social media channels, you can get increased exposure and grow your contact list.

Featuring your loyal subscribers does a similar job. Not everyone can relate to thought leaders and influencers. If you provide a compelling discussion with a member of your audience on how they achieved success, your contacts might be able to connect with their story better, seeing it as something they can reach themselves.

If you’ve got evergreen content that performed fantastically in the past, you can repurpose it for your current newsletter. This can include guides and solutions for your audience’s most frequent pain points. If your old content ties in with any recent news or events, you can approach it from a new angle and make it more relevant.

How to Design Your Email Newsletter

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Optimizing the design of your email newsletter is crucial because it can improve readability, make it more attractive, and boost click-throughs and conversions. Your attention-grabbing content won’t matter if the design doesn’t make it accessible. 

Start With Choosing the Right Template

Your first step is to choose a well-designed template that works best for your goals. Depending on the tool you are using, you can customize existing templates or create one by yourself. You should be able to edit the newsletter as much as possible to make all the elements fit perfectly. The design should be structured with the intention to promote the content in the most digestible fashion. 

To make it work correctly on any device, you should stick to the width of no more than 600px. The optimal length is 20 lines — or approximately 200 words — depending on your audience.

Place the Focus on a Single CTA

While some newsletters can contain multiple CTAs, the best practice is to focus most of the attention on just one. This needs to be the CTA that drives the reader to take the action in line with the newsletter’s primary goal — getting the recipient to subscribe to your mailing list, purchase your product or service, etc.

If you’ve got more than one prominent CTA, you are providing the reader with more choices. Having multiple ones won't convert the recipient. According to Barry Schwartz’s definition of what he calls the paradox of choice, people are less likely to make a decision the more options that they’ve got. The best solution for your email newsletter is to use an image for your crucial CTA and hypertext for any others.

The primary CTA also requires proper text and placement. It should be located above the fold so that it doesn't interfere with the rest of the newsletter. Experiment with different text variations to see which one works best with your target audience. It mustn't be pushy. The best solution is to make it suggestive and informative.

Implement Images Properly

Images can play a vital role in your newsletter. They help the recipient connect with your content and draw attention to the most important sections of the email. You should place them strategically and optimize them to load as fast as possible.

The problem is that some email clients have trouble loading images — riddling your email with blank spaces and butchering your design. The way to overcome this issue is to make sure that your email works well enough without pictures. If the background image isn’t crucial for your design, you should exclude it. As for the email body, you can use alt text to support the missing files. It tells the reader what they should be seeing. Use text to convey the most important information, so it doesn’t get lost on the reader.

It is also important not to overuse pictures. The majority of marketers stick to the 60–40 text-to-image ratio, but this isn’t necessarily the perfect solution. Determine each target audience’s preferences by testing different versions of your newsletter.

Choose the Right Fonts

Font choice is another aspect that contributes to the overall design. Keep in mind that your newsletter won’t look the same in all email clients. To achieve consistency, you should use web-safe fonts. There are a lot of choices that can work well with both your branding and the majority of audiences. Some fonts you should avoid at all cost because they are perceived as boring or even obnoxious. 

Some of the best fonts to use in a newsletter are Calibri, Georgia and Verdana. 

You should also use as little fonts as possible. A newsletter with a bunch of different fonts looks unprofessional and can be a nightmare to follow. The best solution is to pick one. If you want to add more variety, don’t use more than three — one for the headlines, one for the body text, and one to create contrast in specific sections. 

Keep the Text Short and Scannable

When it comes to text, your main focus should be readability. Keeping it short ensures that your audience is engaged. The point of your newsletter is to drive your subscribers to take action — not to make them read huge chunks of text. You should save comprehensive descriptions and storytelling for your blog. 

The most successful option is to write less than 200 words. Keep in mind that this doesn’t have to apply to your specific target audience, so test different variations until you get it right.

It is also crucial that the text is scannable. Even if the newsletter is not long, many people will scan it for relevant information. This is why you need to pay attention to the structure. Separate the content into clear sections. You can use images to help them stand out. Use lists, subheadings, and bullet points to make the content easy to digest.

Use Whitespace and Contrast

Whitespace and contrast are useful methods for making particular elements of the newsletter stand out. Insert images that contrast in color so that it’s visually appealing for the user to go from one to the other. The right amount of whitespace can make all the vital elements more prominent. It has been proven that introducing enough space between paragraphs and in the margins can improve text comprehension by up to 20%.

How to Test Your Email Newsletter

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Testing is crucial for the success of your email newsletter campaign. To find out whether a particular design element or piece of content is working out, you need to see it in action.

The most common testing method is A/B testing. One of the ways you can do it is by sending two versions of your newsletter at the same time. Select a relatively small number of recipients and divide it into two lists. Each list will receive one of the newsletter variants. After a set amount of time, you can look at the results and see which version is performing better. This will tell you whether a particular aspect that you’ve changed in one of the newsletters was the right choice. You can also perform A/B testing for two different days of the week or times of the day.

When you perform A/B testing, you have to base it on just one parameter. If you try to compare multiple elements, you won’t know which of them improved your results.

You can also use an email marketing tool that provides a deliverability testing feature. It is crucial to find out if your subscribers are receiving your emails or their email clients are labeling them as spam. These marketing tools will commonly provide you with a spam score for every email. You should keep optimizing your newsletter campaign until the tool lets you know that the deliverability is at a satisfying rate.

How to Send Your Email Newsletter More Efficiently

To make the most of your newsletter campaigns, you need an automation tool that will enable you to send them out at scheduled times or when users take specific actions. A lot of email marketing software solutions have this feature. The best course of action would be to find a reliable autoresponder.

The good news is that we at Sell SaaS have got just the right tool for you. Our email campaign creator can help you create and optimize a newsletter campaign, and set it up to be automatically sent to your subscribers. Use the tracking feature to check the deliverability of your emails and improve your results.

We’ve also got three email lookup tools that you can use to collect prospect emails and create mailing lists. 

When you subscribe to any of our products, you can use it with no restrictions for a monthly price. 

To help you boost your revenue, we offer white labeling of our software. You can resell all the tools in our software bundle under your brand free of charge! You only need to partner with us and agree to our generous terms. 

As our Starter Partner, you’ll get 60% of the revenue. The more you sell, the more money goes to you. When you become a Super Master SaaS Partner, 80% of the income will be yours.