8-Step Guide to Writing Your First Email Newsletter!

Email newsletters work. They help brands establish direct and personalized communication with customers while influencing their purchasing decisions. It’s no wonder that three out of every four marketers use email newsletters, as per CMI’s B2C content marketing report!

Email newsletters are a versatile marketing tool that allows companies to share a plethora of information about their brands, products, and services. When executed successfully, an e-newsletter strategy can help increase sales and customer loyalty.

But, writing the first email newsletter can be quite overwhelming. Starting from scratch is no easy task! Therefore, we have created a complete guide to writing your first email newsletter.

We will begin with the basics and move towards more complicated elements. Let’s dive right into it!

1. Get an email newsletter service

No, you shouldn’t try sending your newsletters manually. Using Gmail, Outlook, or other email service providers will only limit your potential. These standard email service providers do not provide any scalable solution and should be skipped.

Instead, we suggest you go for dedicated email newsletter solutions that have important tools like email templates, drag-and-drop editors, audience segmentation, performance tracking, real-time analytics, automation, and more.

Additionally, figuring out your marketing budget before you shortlist email newsletter solutions will provide you with viable options for your company.

2. Create compelling content (relatable, too!)

What will you share with your audience through the email newsletter? Content is critical to your email marketing success. As a brand, you should be inclined towards extending maximum value to your customers via newsletter. Therefore, you should shortlist content ideas that are useful, timely, and newsworthy. However, simply creating highly compelling email newsletter copy won’t cut it; the material must be pertinent to your readers. Work to understand your audience and present useful information to them. This will lend credibility and create loyalty to your brand.

Moreover, you shouldn’t be sending the same newsletter to all of your customers. You should create different newsletters for different segments. Most importantly, give attention to details such as customers’ names and interests to make the newsletter content feel more personal. The right combination of relevancy, intrigue, and personalization will make your communication more enjoyable to read. 

2. Strategize (timing is everything!)

You will have to nail the timing, too! You will want to figure out an optimal frequency at which you will share the email newsletter. Marketingsherpa reports that over 60% of readers want to hear from you at least once a week, while only 15% want to hear from you daily. Consider all of the email marketing campaigns your business runs and incorporate your e-newsletter accordingly. After all, you don’t want to annoy your subscribers!

3. Build your subscriber list

Your subscriber list is an asset you will cherish throughout your business life. Why? Email isn’t going away anytime soon. You can always fall back on email marketing when other marketing channels stop working or cease to exist. So, put sincere efforts into building a reliable subscriber list.

You can use tactics like incentivizing sign-ups, running online contests, setting up data capture forms on websites or landing pages, or using social media marketing to grab user information.

Don’t take the easier route of buying an email list just to get more readers. The subscribers on the email list might flag your newsletter as spam. Building the list slowly ensures authenticity.

4. Keep things nice and legal

True, you cannot email just anything to your subscribers. Brands will have to abide by rules and regulations (email legislation) to avoid any lawsuit.

Make sure you understand terms like CAN-SPAM and GDPR before launching your email marketing campaign, as non-compliance will result in hefty fines. You should get consent from internet users before adding them to your subscriber list.

Not just that, brands should also include an unsubscribe link in every email. The email marketing solution you use should have tools that help you legalize your email newsletter content.

5. Use an email newsletter template

You don’t have to sweat it when it comes to creating an email newsletter design from scratch. There are tons of design templates available online, and the email marketing solution that you choose to use should provide you with structure that will give your newsletter shape.

Using email templates helps save time as these are easy to edit and customize. Make sure you spend enough time finding the right template to build on, as you want the template to compliment your brand identity, personality, and theme.

7. Don’t forget fundamental elements

While you focus on the bigger picture, you should not miss out on nailing the fundamentals like subject line, preheader, CTA, and email footer. These are essential to your campaign’s success. Since these elements play a crucial role in boosting an email’s open and conversion rate, we suggest you A/B test them before clicking on “Send.”

8. Test, optimize, and send!

Lastly, you want the email newsletter to work properly before you hit send. It is important that you verify the email content and how the newsletter appears on different devices and screen sizes.

We highly recommend you run A/B tests to create a data-driven email newsletter campaign. Use the insights to optimize the newsletter before it lands in customers’ inboxes.

Moreover, keep track of the newsletter performance by checking the real-time analytics most email marketing solutions have to offer.

Final thoughts!

The best thing about being a newbie email marketer is the freedom to experiment while sticking to the fundamentals. We suggest you get started by using the email newsletter guide outlined in the post as your foundation.

Once you get the foundation right, you can start experimenting with different marketing ideas and trends to breathe new life into your email marketing campaigns. You should experiment enough to figure out the kind of content that resonated with your readers. This will often take some time, but the results this process generates will certainly be worth the effort!

Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments. Also, don’t forget to check out other informative posts on the blog!