Building customer relationships is the cherry on top of every marketing cake, and few tools achieve this better than newsletters. Today, brands that fail to take advantage of newsletters are left behind in the race for customer loyalty.
While newsletters are the industry standard for sharing your best content with clients, doing it right is not the most straightforward task. With so many things battling for attention, consumers need a good reason to open or subscribe to your newsletter. This means only worthy newsletters will grab reader interest and inspire action.
The next question is, how can you provide subscribers with reader-worthy newsletters? If you follow the steps in this article, you will answer this question and drive up customer engagement.
What is a Newsletter?
A newsletter is an email businesses and organizations send to share relevant content with customers or prospects. They function to keep customers engaged and informed about your brand and build trust between you two.
Newsletters can be rounded industry news, promotions, or brand content. Regardless of what you send with a newsletter, you must ensure it is relevant to their buyer persona. Sending a regular customer a newsletter for a prospect can make you lose the customer. So, ensure your newsletters match your level of relationship with the customer. Once you have hacked the newsletter-making process, you are on your way to building an army of loyal customers.
Who writes a Newsletter?
An email newsletter is typically written by an in-house marketer or a freelancer skilled in newsletter publishing. They can also be written by an email marketing agency that handles the company’s email marketing.
A newsletter presents a unique opportunity for solo entrepreneurs to build a community of buyers and subscribers. At the same time, large businesses can leverage newsletters to strengthen their growth and sales, while for non-profits, newsletters have proven a valuable tool in eliciting contributions and donations from their community.
Why are Newsletters Important for Your Marketing?
By now, you are already sold on why starting a newsletter is crucial to your brand’s image, but just in case you have a boss or partner who still considers it a waste of time and resources, here are a few marketing reasons to insist on starting a newsletter;
Lead Conversion
The conversion of leads involves nurturing your prospects till they become paying customers. And few tools for nurturing leads are as effective as newsletters. If you want your leads to go further down the sales funnel, you should start sending out those newsletters.
Customer Loyalty
The personal touch I will show you in writing your newsletters will foster a new level of brand loyalty. No business wants a one-time customer but desires a customer that sticks with its brand. To build customer loyalty amid competing brands, you should send customers newsletters so they know you care.
Understanding your user buyer persona
The success of your marketing depends on how well you know your customer’s buyer persona. Pushing the right content to the wrong customer can be costly. Newsletters are a great way to understand your customer’s buyer persona so you do not share content that is not relevant to them.
Three Pillars of a Great Newsletter
For your newsletter to be successful, there are three things you must pay attention to; its content, its design, and the value it provides.
- Content: Your newsletter’s content depends on your purpose for sending it. Keep it relevant to your customers regardless of what you send it. Most email marketing platforms help their users generate content ideas for their newsletters. You can take advantage of this and save time. You will need to tweak it, but this should not be a problem.
- Design: The beauty of your design will impact your newsletter’s bounce rate. Readers may likely tune out if you also do too much with your design. The key is to strike a balance between beauty and simplicity.
- Value: The value readers get from your newsletter determines if they will become subscribers. Nothing makes a user block an email address faster than an email with zero value. Focus on what your newsletter offers readers if you want to increase your newsletter subscribers.
Great Ideas for Your Newsletter
If you are not sure of what content to include in your newsletter, here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Upcoming Events
- Blog Posts
- Feature a guest in your Newsletter.
- Testimonials & Case Studies
- Guides for using your product
- Discount offers and Flash Sales
Whatever you choose from this pack will largely depend on your marketing goals, so you should consult your team members or partner before deciding.
Steps to Follow When Writing a Great Newsletter
Writing a newsletter is an art and must be done skillfully. Remember, your goal is to build trust with subscribers, and you need the best newsletters to do this.
Below is a step-by-step guide to creating a newsletter that your audience will love;
1. Examine other good email newsletters
Before creating your email newsletter, go through a few email newsletter examples. This mini-research will inspire you to write the best content for your newsletter. Avoid limiting your examples to your industry and broaden your search.
2. Decide if you want to send a Newsletter and what kind
From the examples you examined in the first step, you can decide if you need a newsletter and what kind you will write. It is okay if you decide not to write a newsletter, as not all marketing campaigns require one. If you write a newsletter, ensure it aligns with your marketing objectives. Your newsletter must tie to your business’s strategy to promote its brand. This alignment is vital to your brand in the long run.
The next decision is what content to include in your newsletter. Do you want to tell your brand story, introduce subscribers to a product, or share tool guidelines? If you share a blog post, a promotion, or a case study in your newsletter hinges on what you intend to achieve.
Paying attention to your audience’s persona is also crucial in deciding what content you will share. You do not want your reader ever feeling like he got the wrong email.
3. Create an eye-catching subject line to increase open rates
Email Subject lines are the first thing any reader will see before opening your newsletter. They are the magnet that attracts or repels clicks your way. If an email subject line does not capture readers’ attention, they are less likely to open it. How your subject lines are framed/phrased will make or break your open rates.
One thing to avoid is using misleading subject lines to get readers to click on your newsletter. This isn’t good for building trust- the essence of a newsletter- and will give readers a reason not to subscribe. Strike a balance between getting readers to click on your newsletter and providing accurate subject lines.
Since email subject lines are the headlines of your newsletter, avoid sticking to the same ones repeatedly. Imagine a brand repeatedly sending you the same subject line with a minor tweak. Would you take them seriously? Chances are you wouldn’t. Even if they offer different values to you, your interest won’t be captured. Why? Because, just like every other internet user, you want something fresh, and a recurring subject line is far from it.
Try to be creative with your subject line; this is the best way to keep customers interested in your newsletters. If you are stuck on the subject line to choose, go through your email; whatever great subject lines get you to open newsletters can be your inspiration.
Here are some tips for writing a subject line that will increase your open rate;
- Responsibly Create a fear of missing out (FOMO)
Example: “Only available to our first ten responders” - Offer rare value
Example: “Get a free 10% discount on all purchases this month”.
By the way, adding the word accessible to your email subject line can increase your open rates by at least 10%. - Arouse Curiosity
Example: 70% of doctors make this mistake, do you?
4. Get Creative with the body of your newsletter
After your reader has opened your newsletter, the next thing that pops up is the content of the newsletter. You should be creative with how you write the body of your newsletter. Any sense of boredom and you have lost a subscriber.
It is also essential to write the body of your newsletter in a personal and conversational tone. This will give your readers the sense that you are not just a spam bot and will foster a relationship between you two.
One last thing to look out for when writing the body of your newsletter is grammatical errors or typos. Run your newsletter through a writing assistant like Grammarly or Quillbot to avoid typos. Grammatical errors also make emails appear impersonal.
If you ever get stuck on how to structure the body of your newsletter, here are a few steps that can get you started;
- Begin with a problem your readers have
- Highlight how their problem is affecting them
- Recommend a quick and helpful solution
5. Settle for a tempting call-to-action(CTA)
Call-to-actions are the carrots in our newsletters. Some might say they even represent the essence of our newsletters.
While our newsletters may have multiple CTAs, we must single one out that we want our readers to do. The rest of the CTAs should be ‘do-at-your-convenience’ options(like case studies redirect). This ensures that your prominent CTA does not get lost in the crowd. This call to action should be tempting for the reader and elicit some urge to take action.
Your reader’s decision to take action begins with your email subject line and content. So, make sure you get it right at these stages.
6. Make your design simple and appealing
Newsletters found guilty of having a cluttered design usually experience low subscriber numbers. It can be tempting to dazzle your readers with a crazy newsletter design, but you should ignore this urge. When designing or adopting a design for your newsletter, less is more. Da Vinci did say that simplicity was the ultimate sophistication(maybe he was referring to email newsletters–or not). Also, ensure consistency in color theme throughout your newsletter to make it attractive.
Another way to maintain a minimalist and appealing design for your newsletter is to provide enough white space. Cluttered newsletters are synonymous with too much content. You should keep your copy as concise as possible.
Providing enough white space also makes your newsletter visually appealing. No one wants to have the feeling of reading a lecture when they open your newsletter, so keep your copy short and straight to the point.
7. Make unsubscription easy for users
While this may sound counter-intuitive, you should make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe. Making it easy for your subscribers to leave your subscriber list boosts their confidence in you. It shows them that you are so sure your content is good that you will not stand in their way to unsubscribe. Avoid confusing language like “Alter communication link” or an unrelated image without an alt text. All these affect user experience too, and it is a serious crime to make your user experience terrible on today’s internet.
An easy unsubscription process also ensures you keep a healthy subscriber list. Sending newsletters to uninterested customers does not necessarily mean they will suddenly become interested. Instead, give them some time to reconsider your newsletter.
Asides from the healthy subscriber list, your newsletters are less likely to end up in your reader’s spam list when your subscription process is easy.
8. Schedule your newsletter
Whether monthly, weekly, or quarterly, stick to a consistent schedule for sharing your newsletter. Maintaining a consistent schedule is the final ingredient in building your newsletter fanbase. Users unconsciously mark a particular day or period for you in their minds when you stick to a particular schedule.
4 Things to Avoid in Your Newsletter
For your newsletter to capture your audience’s interest and convert them to subscribers, there are a few things you should avoid, and they include;
1. Irrelevant Content
Avoid putting content in your newsletter that readers may find irrelevant to what they want. Even if some aspect of your newsletter offers value, the irrelevant part may affect how readers judge it. Using excessive words to describe simple things is also bad for your newsletter. Do not succumb to the urge to add a few ‘side’ content. Whatever you think isn’t essential for your newsletter should be cut off.
2. Impersonal content
According to data, 80% of users are more likely to purchase when brands personalize their content.
Like every other marketing piece, newsletters are meant to build rapport with their readers. And nothing defeats this purpose like being impersonal with your newsletters. Readers want to feel like the newsletter was crafted for them, and there is no better way to do this than by being personal.
One of the best ways to be personal with your newsletters is to use your name as the sender instead of your brand’s name. It would also help to use your reader’s first name when referring to them. These steps will give your newsletter subscribers the feeling that what they read was written for them.
Using a second-person point-of-view also helps give your newsletters the personal touch to earn your readers’ attention.
3. Poor formatting
Newsletters should not just be easy to read but also easy to scan. No matter how great your content is, if your newsletter’s formatting is done wrong, readers won’t read it. If your newsletter is a wall of text without good headings, your readers will be disinterested.
Ensure you follow good formatting guidelines to grab the reader’s attention.
4. Images without alt text
Putting visual content in your newsletter is a great way to engage your audience. But just because it’s an email does not mean your images should be added without alt text.
Some users may not have images enabled on their email or mobile devices, which can affect how your content is presented to users. To be safe, ensure all your images have alt text.
Measuring the Success of Your Newsletters
After sending out your newsletter, you will want to monitor its progress and success. Metrics for measuring success may vary from the number of new subscribers to the newsletter’s open rate. Whatever you decide to measure, allow some time before reviewing the numbers to get an accurate analysis of your performance.
As you monitor your newsletter’s success, please record all the numbers you see and the timestamps on them. This record-keeping will help you improve how you write your newsletter in the long run. Here are a few data to keep an eye on;
- Open Rates/ Total opens
- Website Visitors
- Bounce rate
- Number of forwards
- Click-through rate
- New subscribers
I know a lot has been covered on how to write a newsletter. But trust me, once you take it in bits and add some creativity, you are on your way to dazzling your readers with a captivating newsletter.
Advanced Marketing Steps to Improve Your Newsletter
As your email newsletter numbers start turning green, you may want to sustain the momentum of your success. Here are a few marketing tips that will help you build on your success;
A/B testing
Use split testing to determine the subject lines or content your readers like. A/B or split testing involves showing two different things to two different sets of users. Once you conduct a split test, you can do away with content or subject lines that are not working.
Customer Segmentation
You can segment your readers into categories based on the result of your A/B test. This segmentation empowers you to serve readers with content that they care about. Readers want to feel special; nothing says you are unique, like reader-specific content.
MailChimp says segmented lists get twice as many clicks and 14.31% more opens than non-segmented lists. Start grouping your subscribers if you are interested in the growth of your newsletter.
Conduct Surveys
As part of efforts to understand your readers, you can conduct surveys on them. From these surveys, you can know for sure whether or not your newsletters are working. I’d recommend survey monkey for this process.
FAQs on Newsletters
What Is A Newsletter Format?
A newsletter format is how a newsletter writer presents their newsletter. They can choose either plain text or an HTML format. As the name implies, plain text comprises mainly text, while HTML has visual elements like images or gifs. Ideally, you want to strike a balance between the two. While plain text, no matter how useful, may be boring to read. This balance is essential because some email clients may flag a text with heavy HTML and leave it spam.
What Is The Difference Between An Email Campaign And An Email Newsletter
An email campaign is a marketing tool used to sell customers a particular item within a timeframe, while an email newsletter is sent out to keep subscribers or potential subscribers informed of whatever information you have to share. The difference between the two lies in the consistency and frequency of the two.
What Are The 5 Elements Of An Effective Newsletter?
The elements of an effective newsletter are;
- A catchy subject line
- Balanced graphics with excellent copy
- An excellent call to Action
- An easy-to-use unsubscribe option
- An overall Minimalist design
