How to Create an Email Newsletter — A Comprehensive Guide

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Email newsletters are an efficient marketing method for attracting and retaining subscribers. Newsletter campaigns are a part of a larger marketing strategy that aims to maintain constant communication with users that have shown an interest in your business.

Email newsletters are the most efficient if you send them out regularly and provide your users with valuable content, such as:

• Blog posts

• Guides

• Product reviews

• Announcements

• Tips

• Personal recommendations

• Unique offers

Newsletters that call to action effectively can boost your ROI, revenue, website traffic, and number of subscribers. You may be wondering — how to create an email newsletter that can achieve fantastic results?

To help you get the best answer, we have created this comprehensive guide. Step by step, we are going to help you learn how to:

1. Create a segmented mailing list

2. Define the primary goal

3. Design a compelling email newsletter template

4. Fill the newsletter with your content

5. Create attention-grabbing CTAs

6. Add alt text and plain text support

7. Ensure that your campaign aligns with applicable regulations

8. Test out your newsletter

9. Make sure all the links are valid

10. Send your emails more efficiently with an autoresponder tool

11. Optimize your newsletter over time

Create a Segmented Mailing List

Before you get down to creating an email newsletter, you have to specify who you are going to send it to. You need to collect all the lists and prospecting efforts you might have from previous campaigns and combine them into a single, properly organized file. 

This doesn’t mean that you should put together all the names that you’ve got. You need to segment your list according to specific factors, such as:

Since you’ll be sending highly-targeted and personalized messages, you need to narrow down your list as much as possible. When you’re done sorting out the contacts, you will have your mailing list ready to be implemented into your marketing campaign.

Define the Primary Goal

The newsletter has to fit in with your entire content marketing strategy. You need to optimize it with a specific purpose in mind to make it work. If you focus on too many aspects at once, your recipients are likely to get confused. Even worse, if the purpose of your email isn’t clear, the message will be lost on the reader, and the whole newsletter will look like spam.

What do you want to achieve with your email newsletter? You might be looking to:

• Generate leads

• Send traffic to your landing page

• Gather more contacts

• Educate your audience

• Market your new product or service

Determining a specific goal will help you create the best content for the newsletter.

Design a Compelling Email Newsletter Template

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The way your newsletter looks is almost as important as what it says. The template you choose or create has to be both practical and enticing. You need to have enough space to promote your content. If the template has too many design elements and requires that you cram your copy into a limited space, you need a better option.

It is even better if the template is easy on the eye. Your goal is to highlight the content and draw the readers to take action. 

Color plays a vital role in your designs. It can affect the way your recipients feel and the decisions that they make. Businesses often use the color blue because it represents reliability and responsibility. Red is commonly used for CTAs because it incites a sense of urgency and drives people to act.

Your template needs to be viewable on all devices. About 60% of all email opens can be attributed to mobile users. Having a mobile-friendly email newsletter design is a must if you don’t want to throw away a large number of recipients. The width of the template shouldn’t exceed 600px. There are no restrictions in terms of height, but you don’t want to make your newsletter too long. Stretched-out emails are seen as spammy. The optimal length of a newsletter is 20 lines — or approximately 200 words. It depends on your target audience’s preferences, so you should test different variations.

Fill the Newsletter With Your Content

Once you’ve got the right template, it’s time to add the content. This is the most important aspect of your newsletter, so take all the time you need to polish it. Pay attention to the order of information. Vital information has to come first — then, allow the rest to follow naturally. People will most commonly click on the first CTA, so you need to hold their attention if you want them to read everything.

Now that you’ve got your primary goal defined, you can tailor the content in line with it. You should be consistent throughout the newsletter. Decide how you want to convey the message, determine the appropriate voice, and stick to it.

Start with the email subject line. It is the first line of text your recipients get to see, so it needs to grab their attention and pique their curiosity. There is a variety of approaches that work, such as:

• Humorous subject lines

• Simple and direct subject lines

• Numbered subject lines

• Shocking subject lines

Keep the content short and to-the-point. Images can complement it, but you have to optimize them for email so that they don’t take forever to load. If you’ve got the necessary tools, you can personalize bits of your content for each of your recipients.

Create Attention-Grabbing CTAs 

Implement your CTAs strategically. Design and place them so that they are effective but not too aggressive. It is essential that they don’t come off as pushy. Try to imagine your CTA as a sales assistant in a retail shop. What are the chances that a customer will make a purchase if the assistant is overly assertive? The more likely scenario is that your company’s efforts to make a sale will be seen as obnoxious. It is significantly more effective to take an informational and suggestive approach. 

Place your primary call-to-action above the fold. This will make it prominent but not let it interfere with the rest of the content. If a recipient wants to read the rest of the email, the CTA shouldn’t distract them from it. You should also experiment with the CTA texts and see which wording works best for your target audience. Try using words such as discover, explore, create, join, and upgrade. Sometimes it comes down to the difference between asking your recipients to purchase and buy something.

Add Alt Text and Plain Text Support

There are two ESP-related issues that you need to be prepared for:

1. When the images won’t load

2. When the HTML won’t load

Some of your recipients’ ESPs can have trouble loading images. If you input an appropriate alt text, it will appear instead of the missing image and let users know what they’re supposed to see. If your CTAs are image files, your newsletter will be far less successful without the help of alt text.

Plain text replaces the HTML that won’t display properly. You need to design your newsletter so that it looks good in both cases. 

The links should be easy to spot, and the recipient needs to be able to tell what your email is about even without the images. This way, you won’t have to worry about your campaign results being hindered by email client errors.

Ensure that Your Campaign Aligns with Applicable Regulations

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Your emails must comply with the rules governed by two major laws:

1. The CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) Act

2. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

The CAN-SPAM Act covers your recipients in the United States. To comply with it, you need to make sure that your emails have a footer that contains your address and a simple way to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

GDPR is a European law and covers all the countries that are a part of the EU. It requires that you only send your email newsletters to contacts that have agreed to receive them. This means that you have to make it optional for all European users to sign up for your newsletter.

If you don’t comply with the rules governed by CAN-SPAM and GDPR, you should worry about more than just a tarnished reputation. You can face severe financial penalties and end up losing your business.

Make Your Newsletter Emails Shareable

With many email marketing tools available on the market, you can add a sharing button to your newsletter emails. Your recipients can use it to forward your newsletter to a friend or share it on their social media channels.

This is an efficient way to make your content available to an audience that isn’t on your mailing list. You can attract prospects and draw them to subscribe to your newsletter.

Test Out Your Newsletter 

To ensure that your newsletter is achieving the desired results, you have to test it out. There are two ways to do that:

• A/B testing

• Deliverability testing

A/B testing means trying out two versions of the newsletter simultaneously. You need to select a relatively small number of contacts from your list and split it into two groups. Each group should receive one version of the newsletter. This will enable you to see which version works better so that you can send it to your entire contact list and get improved results.

Deliverability testing means finding out whether your emails are reaching the recipients’ inboxes and not being labeled as spam. There is a great variety of email marketing tools that provide this feature. Use it to check if your email newsletter is being accepted by different ESPs, such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, etc. With some tools, you can see the spam score for every newsletter that you create. Keep adjusting different elements until the score tells you that the deliverability is at a satisfying level.

Make Sure All the Links Are Valid

Whenever you want to test out your newsletter, you should check whether all the links lead to where they are supposed to. Broken links and wrong URLs can ruin the user experience. If a recipient ends up on a wrong landing page, or worse — a 404 error page — they are likely to lose trust in your brand or business. They might even decide to unsubscribe.

Check if your landing pages are loading properly, and if the links in your newsletter are up to date. It isn’t uncommon to accidentally insert links with syntax errors. You can use a link validation tool to see if all the links will take the users where you want them to be.

Send Your Emails More Efficiently With an Autoresponder Tool

One of the best methods for sending your email newsletter is to automate the process with an autoresponder tool. When someone chooses to subscribe to your mailing list, they will automatically receive your newsletter.

We at Sell SaaS have a solution for you. Our software bundle offers a variety of email marketing tools, including an email campaign creator. You can use it to create and set up your newsletter campaigns so that they are automatically sent to all the contacts on your mailing list. It also includes a tracking feature that enables you to evaluate the success of your campaign in terms of deliverability. 

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Your only obligation is to share a percentage of the profits with us. You start by getting 60%. If your sales are lucrative, you can earn up to 80% of the income.

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Optimize Your Newsletter Over Time

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Once you’ve sent out your first batch of newsletter emails, you can keep optimizing them for better results in the future. To do so, you have to understand and track email metrics. This includes:

• Open rate

• Click rate

• Unsubscribe rate

• Conversions per click

Tracking these metrics will enable you to see how your target audience is reacting to your newsletter. This knowledge can help you learn which aspects you need to improve. 

Do your links have a low click rate? Maybe you need to make your CTAs more prominent or improve their text. Is the open rate not high enough? It could be that your subject line isn’t as compelling as you thought it was. Are there a lot of unsubscriptions? Perhaps you should improve your list segmentation to achieve better targeting.

The best course of action is to track your results and keep optimizing your newsletter constantly. A solution that worked once doesn’t mean that it’ll have the same effect in a couple of weeks. If you are getting positive results, it shouldn’t stop you from trying to do even better.

Conclusion

Even though the primary purpose of creating an email newsletter is to achieve a specific business goal, you need to keep in mind that you are designing it for your audience. You want them to click that CTA and take action — and you will get them there — but you should see your newsletter as an opportunity to form a deeper connection with them.