Email Newsletter Best Practices — How To Create a Newsletter That Calls to Action

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Newsflash! Email newsletters can help you create engaged audiences.

An email newsletter is an effective solution for putting together a report that consists of your promotions, announcements, top-notch articles, and other valuable content. It’s a great way to keep your contacts in the loop, and it can also help you generate more website traffic.

With the rise of social media advertising, one might think that newsletters are outdated. The statistics paint a different picture. 81% of B2B marketers claim that their most used form of content marketing is email newsletter. According to the study performed by the Nielsen Norman Group, 90% of participants chose to receive updates from a company via newsletters instead of Facebook.

An email newsletter is generally a part of an extensive email marketing strategy. It’s an efficient type of content for the consideration stage of the customer’s journey. It enables you to provide your recipients with valuable information on how they can solve their problems and point them in your direction.

The effectiveness of your newsletters depends on applying the best email marketing newsletter practices. In this article, we’re going to cover the best practices for creating a compelling newsletter that generates optimal results. Let’s take a look at how you can:

1. Segment your contact list

2. Personalize your newsletter

3. Provide value to your recipients

4. Write attention-grabbing subject lines

5. Create and organize compelling CTAs

6. Write a concise and scannable copy

7. Send your email newsletter

How To Segment Your Contact List

List segmentation is one of the most important email marketing practices. It enables you to create highly targeted contact groups that you can tailor your content to. You need to meet each of your recipient’s needs and interests. This includes optimizing a wide range of aspects, from the type of content to the way you design your CTAs. You can segment your contacts based on factors such as user actions, purchasing habits, and personal characteristics.

This enables you to create customized campaigns for each contact group. You can provide your recipients with relevant offers and information, and send your newsletters at opportune times. 

How To Personalize Your Newsletter

Segmentation goes hand in hand with personalization. Aside from providing your recipients with relevant content, you can get even closer to them by including personalization elements in your newsletters. 

Plenty of email marketing software solutions enable you to extract personal information from contact lists and insert it into your emails. This can be done via shortcodes and automated personalization features. You can refer to your recipients by their name and include other details such as their:

• Job title

• Location

• Industry

• Company

Keep in mind that recipients expect your newsletters to be personalized. 52% of customers say they’ll look for other options if they don’t receive personalized emails from a business.

How To Provide Value to Your Recipients

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Regardless of whether you are sending your newsletter as a part of your email marketing campaign or in an email blast, you need to provide your recipients with relevant and valuable content. If you are emailing leads in an early stage of the customer journey, you can’t bombard them with product offers. Your newsletter needs to consist of materials that will help them learn more about their pain points, such as:

• Blog posts

• Articles

• Infographics

• Videos

Even when you convert leads into loyal customers, they don’t want to receive the same type of content all the time. If you keep trying to sell them something constantly, the chances are that they’ll lose interest. Your newsletters should be a mix of promotions and educational content. 

Let’s say that you’re running a retail store and you’ve got a customer that has purchased pants from you. You should send them newsletters informing them about new products and special offers, but you need to provide them with more than that. Include valuable content such as articles and blog posts about new clothing trends and how they can combine the pants you’re selling with particular outfits.

Here are a few more ideas for the types of content you can focus your newsletters on:

1. Featuring influencers and loyal subscribers

2. Repurposing evergreen content

Featuring Influencers and Loyal Subscribers

One of the best strategies for impacting your recipients’ decisions is to feature other people that they’re likely to trust. 

We live in an era of influencers and thought leaders. If you get the opportunity to interview one, you can provide your recipients with a new perspective on a relevant subject. Not only is this an effective way to engage and educate your subscribers, but it can also help you boost your exposure and grow your email list.

You can also include loyal subscribers that your other contacts can relate to easily. Provide a compelling discussion with a customer that reached an important goal thanks to your product. If your prospects can connect with their story, you can improve your sales and conversions.

Repurposing Evergreen Content

Almost any piece of evergreen content that you’ve got can be repurposed. If you’ve written a guide that helped users in the past, you can polish it and use it to engage new leads. 

One of the best opportunities you should make the most of is tying your content to recent events. You can make the content more relevant by presenting it from a new perspective.

How To Write Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines

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One of the crucial factors for getting high email open rates is crafting compelling email subject lines. Next to the preheader and sender name, the subject line is the first line of text that your recipients get to see. First impressions are crucial, so you need to ensure that the subject line piques the recipients’ interest and drives them to open your email. 

Consider the fact that 47% of all email opens depend on email subject lines alone.

There is a wide range of approaches when it comes to writing subject lines. It all depends on the target audience and the purpose of your email. Some of the types are:

1. Humorous

2. Urgent

3. Shocking

4. Intriguing

Humorous Subject Lines

Humor can be one of the best methods for getting your emails opened. It requires knowing your target audience well because not everyone will find the same kind of joke funny. If you want to incorporate popular culture references, you need to ensure that your segmented contact group will get them.

Urgent Subject Lines

Your subject line can create a sense of urgency by making use of the social phenomenon known as FOMO (fear of missing out). Provide your recipients with a limited offer that they need to act on as soon as possible. If other customers are satisfied with your product, your recipients might be inclined to check it out so that they don’t miss out on the opportunity.

Shocking Subject Lines

Many people are attracted to shocking and controversial statements. Your subject line can surprise them this way and drive them to check out your email. Just like with humorous subject lines, this approach requires focusing on a contact group that you are familiar with. If your recipients find the subject line offensive, you’ll most likely never see them again.

Intriguing Subject Lines

People are often intrigued by a sense of mystery. Your subject line can pique their curiosity and promise an engaging story. You need to be careful about meeting their expectations. If the payoff in your email is unsatisfactory, you’ll lose their interest and they might trust you less in the future. You should also avoid sounding overly vague because many subscribers will perceive your subject line as spammy instead of mysterious.

Let’s take a look at some of the best examples of these types of subject lines:

How To Create and Organize Compelling CTAs

Newsletters consist of various content pieces followed by relevant CTAs. Even though you want your recipients to perform different actions, your calls-to-action need a hierarchy. 

If you provide your subscribers with multiple options with equal relevance, the chances are that they won’t pick any of them. This is a phenomenon that the renowned psychologist Barry Schwartz defined as the paradox of choice. You need to focus your newsletter on one CTA more than the others. It should revolve around a single goal, such as:

• Subscribing to your mailing list

• Purchasing a product or service

• Checking out your blog content

You can make your primary CTA stand out by using an image for it and turning the rest into hyperlinks. When it comes to the CTA design, you need to focus on three aspects:

1. Placement

2. Color

3. Size

CTA Placement

One of the most common practices is placing your primary CTA above the fold. While this solution may generate clicks in a large number of cases, it’s more important to make it fit your overall layout and design. The best advice is to ensure that the call-to-action follows the general flow of the email.

CTA Color

The choice of colors matters because it can affect how your recipients feel, think, and behave. If you want your CTA to create a sense of urgency, you can use the red color. Your primary goal is to contrast the button with the rest of the design.

CTA Size

On average, a CTA should be 47.9 pixels tall. When it comes to font size, it should be at least 16px. You should use these numbers as a reference point and A/B test different versions for optimal results.

How To Write a Concise and Scannable Copy

When writing the copy, your main focus should be to make it as digestible as possible. People scan emails for valuable information. If you want them to perform a particular action, you have to be concise. 

You should break your content into clear sections. Use lists and bullet points to highlight crucial pieces of information. Images can also help you draw the reader’s attention to certain details, but you shouldn’t use too many. You also need to support them with alt text because some email clients disallow them.

The newsletter mustn’t be overly long. The general advice is to use less than 200 words. It depends on your target audience, so you should test different versions.

How To Send Your Email Newsletter

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Email newsletters are particularly effective when they are a part of an extensive email marketing campaign. This means that you should include them in the automated email sequences that you create for nurturing leads. 

Email marketing automation enables you to schedule your newsletters and set them up to be sent when your subscribers perform specific actions. What you need to do is to find a reliable autoresponder tool.

The good news is that we at Sell SaaS have got a solution for you. The Sell SaaS software bundle includes our email campaign creator — a powerful autoresponder tool for creating email newsletter campaigns. 

You can create and customize your emails in a user-friendly online editor. Once you’ve set your newsletters up, you can automate them to be sent both as drip and trigger campaigns. There’s also an email tracking feature that enables you to determine the success of your email newsletters in terms of deliverability rates.

Sell SaaS Lead Generation Tools

We’ve also got an assortment of lead generation tools for starting an email list that you’re going to send your newsletters to. This includes our:

Other Sell SaaS Solutions You Should Try

We’ve also got two solutions that can help you improve the effectiveness of your subscription forms. These are:

1. API that prevents fake email registrations

2. Social proof notification widget

API That Prevents Fake Email Registrations

There’s plenty of people who don’t want to share their real email address, so they use a fake one to subscribe to websites instead. Since you want your subscription forms to generate as many leads as possible, and you don’t want to have to clean your email list more than you already do, our API can help you out. 

The API verifies email addresses and blocks the ones that aren’t associated with existing email accounts. This way, if a user wants to download a lead magnet that requires subscribing to your mailing list, they will have to use a real email address.

Social Proof Notification Widget

Our social proof notification widget lets your website visitors know when another user performs a particular action, such as purchasing a product or subscribing to your mailing list. 

Plenty of your visitors are on the fence when it comes to making a decision. Letting them know that there are other people doing business with you is a great way to encourage them to take action.

Why Sell SaaS?

You should choose our SaaS solutions because we provide a fantastic opportunity for you to both use and resell them. You can create an additional stream of revenue by selling our tools under your brand.

How does our deal work? It follows a simple rule — the more you sell, the more you get to earn. When you partner up with us, 60% of all the revenue goes to you. If your sales are lucrative, you can earn up to 80%. In case you’re wondering — there are no additional fees you need to worry about.