How To Create An Email Newsletter

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What is an email newsletter?

Basically, an email newsletter is a type of email sent by companies or individuals to a list of subscribers. That list should include existing or potential customers who have signed up and have clearly consented to receive digital marketing communications from your brand. Email newsletters are sent regularly and contain valuable content such as guides, blog posts, news, product reviews, personal recommendations, tips, announcements, and other resources.

Newsletters are an essential part of an email marketing strategy. They allow companies to nurture their contacts by establishing themselves as key players in their industry, sharing information and highlighting new products that will drive traffic to the website.

Why you need a newsletter for Email

Email newsletters are one of the most popular ways to nurture existing and potential customers. Because? Well, mainly because it is low cost and has a great return on investment (ROI). Email marketingis one of the most effective marketing channels for small and large businesses. The average ROI is £35 for every £1 spent, and 76% of customers prefer email communication prior to purchase.

Well-designed marketing emails are sent regularly, such as email newsletters, webinars, event and product registrations. sales ensure constant website traffic. Newsletters typically make up the bulk of all marketing emails sent and have great potential.

Wondering if setting up an email newsletter is the right step for you? your business? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of sending one.

Pros of Email Newsletters

Creating a newsletter isn’t just a way to keep your customers informed about your new products or features. , they have many other advantages.

Continuous source of traffic

One of the main reasons to create a newsletter is that it generates regular traffic to the website . Organic engagement on social media platforms like Facebook is declining dramatically. Banner advertising is rarely noticed in the age of ad blockers. Written press releases sent via email will often be ignored by online journalists and publishers.

Fortunately, this is not true of newsletters. Emails that arrive in someone’s inbox are usually seen, and the chance of them being opened is around 20-25%. As long as the subject line is engaging and the sender is acknowledged (so make sure your readers know who you are!). If your newsletter is well-designed and contains relevant content, this will improve your chances that the reader will click on your CTAs to learn more.

More cheap than other channels

Budget is important to marketers. So anything that saves you money should be a top priority, and newsletters are.

Don’t underestimate how much money email marketing saves you compared to using other marketing tools. Paid ads like banner advertising, Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and influencer marketing are considerably more expensive than email marketing.

Advanced performance tracking and simple

Measuring the performance of an email newsletter is simple. Your email statistics give you all the information you need to do this: open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, bounces, device used to open the newsletter and when, which links are clicked. in etc These metrics, along with UTM tags to track engagement via Google Analytics, will help you accurately calculate your ROI and produce relevant newsletter content for your target audience.

Independence from third parties

When you create a newsletter, you are independent from other service and software providers. Publishers, influencers, social media platforms, and Google are much more likely to drive up advertising costs than email service providers (ESPs).

Easily linked to other marketing channels on online

Newsletters and other marketing tools such as social media can be combined easily and effectively. And they can reach audiences anywhere, whether they’re in the office on their work computer, on the couch at home with a tablet, or on the go with their smartphone. Emails can be opened and read anywhere.

Email Newsletter Disadvantages

Where there’s yin, there’s yang. Or to put it another way, where there is light, there is also darkness. While email newsletters provide many benefits, there are also a couple of drawbacks to consider.

No Physical Experience

Unlike analog advertising media such as brochures, flyers, magazines, etc., there is no haptic experience with email newsletters. For example, a desktop calendar is visible all year. Emails, on the other hand, are intangible.

Emails, therefore, have a shorter lifespan but are also less of a hassle to organize and are better for environment.

Ease of Removal

Let’s be honest: emails tend to be deleted faster and are more likely to be skimmed than physical media. There are many reasons for this: a crowded inbox, unappealing subject lines, irrelevant content, etc.

While we can optimize our messages to avoid this, we can never guarantee an engagement rate. 100%. This is true not just for newsletters, but for all marketing tools.

However, when we weigh the benefits and drawbacks of newsletters, it quickly becomes clear that the pros far outweigh the cons. .</p

Don’t take our word for it, though. Create an account and try it yourself! We’re sure you’ll also become a newsletter fan in no time.

How to Create an Effective Email Newsletter

Well, we’ve convinced you to try out the newsletters. newsletters. Hurrah! To help you get the most out of your new favorite marketing channel, here’s everything you need to know to plan an effective newsletter strategy. Your competitors will want all their emails to be like yours.

Here are the steps you should take to create an email newsletter for your business:

Establish Your goals and objectives
Find the right platform for your newsletter
Build your newsletter subscriber list
Segment your contacts for better targeting
Design beautiful email templates for your newsletter
Define your newsletter content

Let’s go over the nuts and bolts of good email marketing.

Set your goals and objectives

First things first. Before you even start designing your email newsletter template, you’ll need to think about why you want to implement one. Consider the following elements to ensure you are crafting the right messages.

Identify a target audience

Defining your audience is essential to the success of your campaign. You need to understand the needs and wants of your potential readers in order to provide value and send newsletters that engage your audience.

So think about who you want to reach with your emails and try to be as specific as possible. Consider things like demographics, location, and interests. If your goal is to reach a global audience, it can be difficult to be precise in your definition, but segmenting your audience (which we’ll cover later) can help you send more relevant emails.

Determine the basic objectives

What do you want to achieve with your newsletter campaign? Some companies launch newsletters to drive traffic to their website, others want to increase sales on their online store or invite people to upcoming events.

Setting goals gives your campaign more visibility. newsletters serve a purpose and help you measure the performance of your efforts. These specific objectives depend on your company’s goals, vision, and values.

Once you have defined your objectives, you need to determine the KPIs you want to track. If you’re not sure where to start, you might want to consider some of the more typical metrics that are measured for newsletters:

Newsletter Subscriptions

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Open rates

Click-through rates (CTR)
Spam and block rates
Newsletter Unsubscribe Rates

Discover Your Focus Topics

Theme Planning of your newsletter is closely related to the objectives you have defined, but creating content can be difficult at first.

For inspiration, analyze your competitors’ newsletters and company newsletters that you think are successful in email marketing. This will give you inspiration on potential new topics, products, events, etc. You can also run a survey ahead of time and ask your contacts to share their thoughts as your newsletter list grows.</p

Here are some examples of newsletter content you could include :

Product Launches and Industry News
New or Popular Blog Posts
YouTube videos and podcasts
Upcoming events and webinars
Case studies and case histories customers
New stories about your company culture and job openings
FAQs and other resources for customers support

Our internal calendar of email marketing newsletters.

Find the right platform for your newsletter

Before you start creating newsletters, you should find a newsletter solution that allows you to create, send, and analyze email campaigns.

The problem is that there are so many professional newsletter solutions on the market, which can be both a curse and a blessing for senders. For one, you have a wide variety of suitable Email Service Providers (ESPs) to choose from. But on the other hand, researching them can seem a bit overwhelming.

So what should you look for in email marketing software?

Email platform features you need for a successful newsletter

Find The best email platform for your business will depend on your business needs.

But here are some features that can help you get the most out of your email program:

Drag-and-drop editor to easily create newsletters in a few minutes.
A great and responsive Newsletter Template Gallery.
Email Personalization Features and email segmentation to create targeted and relevant email content.
Contact Management Options clear and structured that allow you to manage your contact lists easily.
Test s A/B to increase the participation of your campaigns.
Detailed statistics that allow you to analyze and optimize your electronic newsletter.
Optimal deliverability a ens Get your newsletters to the inbox.
Integrations with other applications such as WordPress, e-commerce systems, etc.
Complies with the GDPR and other certifications that guarantee the highest levels of data security.
Collaborate easily and in real time with your team.

Mailjet Newsletter Drag and Drop Tool

Build Your Newsletter List

To be able to create and send out a newsletter, you obviously need recipients ( duh!). Setting up an email contact list with high engagement rates is relatively simple if you take a few factors into account.

Add subscription widgets to your site

To gain new subscribers, you First thing to do is What you need is a responsive opt-in widget with a double opt-in process. Add the subscription registration form to all relevant pages of your website. Some of the most effective places to include your widget are: the home page, blog, footer, and pages with restricted content such as guides, whitepapers, and more.

Mailjet allows you to create responsive subscription widgets.

Consider using popups to drive subscriptions from subscribers. Pop-ups don’t necessarily have to be direct, they come in all shapes and sizes, and many are subtle and unobtrusive. Mailjet has partnered with popup partners Poptin to help you produce seamless popups.

Double opt-in ensures no fake email addresses enter your database and damage your reputation and deliverability. If you don’t, you risk being labeled as a spammer by recipients and ISPs themselves.

Don’t buy email lists

Giving in to the temptation to buy email addresses will result in the same scenario. Buying third-party email contacts remains very popular because many companies still believe that an email contact list needs to be as large as possible to be successful. This is by no means true, trust us. Buying contact lists is essentially a waste of money.

People on such lists generally don’t want to hear from you, so this often results in spam complaints and subscription cancellations. . These lists also tend to include spam traps, which can seriously hurt your deliverability.

Create Newsletter Landing Pages

In addition to implementing a responsive subscription widget, special newsletter landing pages are a great way to grow contact lists. These pages allow you to use all the optimization opportunities that apply to landing pages.

The potential newsletter subscriber is not distracted from other elements of the website. So they focus on all the great reasons why their newsletter is the best thing written since Harry Potter.

Explore other channels

There are other ways to grow your email lists, such as promoting it on your social media platforms, incentivizing existing subscribers to share, or encourage people to participate in events or in your physical store.

Consider what benefits potential recipients may have if they subscribe to your newsletter. Ideally, that you have already clarified these reasons in your strategy. Real added value, for example, is provided by things like:

Special offers and coupons
Advanced information and reservation services
Invitations to exclusive events
Regular industry information
Access to exclusive content like eBooks
Email mini-courses

Get consent from your contacts

But remember, regardless of how you get subscribers, you should always ask for consent before adding someone to your email database. Remember what spam and data protection laws (such as GDPR) say about consent, and make sure you comply with applicable regulations.

Segment your contacts for better targeting

Instead of sending the same message to all your customers, take advantage of segmentation to get the most out of your emails. Think about how you can use the information you have about your customers to create segments and send personalized email marketing campaigns that really target that group.

Create your segments to Your Email Newsletter

To determine the type of data to use to segment your list, think about what would make sense for your business. Consider if there are any obvious ways to group your customers based on different characteristics.

To give you some inspiration, here are some examples of the type of data you can use:

If If you want to be even more specific about your segments, you can combine different data types and create even more precise groups. For example, you could focus only on women who prefer to buy shoes and who have made a purchase in the last six months.

Once you have different groups of customers with similar characteristics, interests, or habits, it will be easier to understand each segment and create messages that resonate well with each one.

Craft Your Newsletter Message

Now that you have your segments, it’s time to put them out In use. As you start planning your campaign, consider how you can create a message based on these segments. Basically, you want your campaign to match the segment you’re sending it to, so always keep your audience in mind.

To follow the different types of data suggested above , here are some ideas of how you could match your message to each segment:

By matching the segment to a suitable message, your campaigns will be much more targeted. Keeping in mind the different characteristics, preferences and needs of its customers.

Design Beautiful Email Templates for Your Newsletter

The first step in creating a newsletter is to set up an email template. You can use a newsletter template provided by your ESP (ours are great!) and adapt it as needed to match your branding and needs.

Alternatively, you can upload an HTML newsletter template that you have already created or purchased from a third party. In this case, make sure the selected design is responsive so that your email campaigns display perfectly on all end devices.

Ready to dive in? There are five main things to consider when designing an email.

Think about the content before creating your templates

The first thing to consider when creating a newsletter template informative is the content. Is it relevant to your audience? Is it attractive enough? Do you follow your brand guidelines? Keep your content short and to the point, since you only have the reader’s attention for a small amount of time.

How to: Use images in the top of your email to grab the reader’s attention, followed by a short copy and a clear call to action.

Keep your email newsletter simple

Give Give your newsletters a consistent design and don’t clutter your email with too much information. Provide plenty of white space and keep your newsletter simple and uncluttered. If you work with different types of newsletters, you’ll need to use different email newsletter designs. But remember to provide consistency with the same use of colors, fonts, and hierarchy. This ensures clarity and professionalism.

A clear structure ensures that subscribers grasp the main content and messages immediately. Insert your company logo at the top so readers immediately associate the newsletter with you. Add images to grab your readers’ attention, followed by short text and a clear CTA.

How to: To make your email play across multiple devices, keep in mind your email size. The ideal width is between 500 – 680 px. Our article, Email Design: Trends and Best Practices, offers a complete guide to email design best practices.

Think about colors

Make sure you stay true to your brand identity and think about your audience. By using specific colors based on your demographics and seasonal themes, you can improve your results and ultimately ROI.

How to: Consider your demographics: Is this a serious professional newsletter for investors? In this case, create a neutral palette that occasionally uses your logo’s brand colors for calls-to-action, callouts, and links. You can also wear relevant colors to match the season, such as crimson red for Christmas and brown for fall. Finally, make sure your colors have good contrast against a dark background.

Use Images Wisely

Images and other visual elements enhance your newsletter optically. But beware! Too many graphic elements can negatively affect your deliverability, as this is a favored tactic of spammers. ISPs know this well and often block emails that contain large images.So always aim for a healthy 60:40 balance between text and graphics.

Remember to add alt tags to images and scale them down to the size you want. Please note that some email clients block images so that subscribers only see a large blank area. By adding alt tags, they will at least have an idea of what they should be looking at.

Don’t be pushy

If you want your users to take action through your emails, don’t be pushy. too pushy with your CTA buttons. Imagine that your CTA is a sales assistant in a store. Are you likely to trust an assistant who is pressuring you to try on shoes or buy a specific top? Or do you trust the assistant who is expert, subtle but suggestive? The same applies here.

How: Think about the placement of your CTAs and always have your main CTA in the top half of the page (the page you can see without scrolling). ). Also, make sure it has relevant text. For example, you might find emails sent to a certain demographic who prefer “Buy Now” to “Buy Now“. Do research, A/B test, and benchmark your campaigns to improve your CTA.

Make Sure Your Newsletter Responds

In an increasingly mobile world, your content and the entire funnel They should be optimized for mobile devices to get the most out of your mobile audience. Studies have found that at least 41% of emails are opened on mobile first. In other words, if you haven’t optimized your newsletters for mobile devices yet, now is a great time to do so.

Mailjet’s responsive email rendering on all devices.< /p

To get you started, we’ve rounded up some of the most important steps to take when optimizing your campaign for a mobile audience:

Stick to one- column templates, so your emails aren’t too wide for mobile devices. Break your text into smaller sections and make it easy for readers to get an overview of the email content.

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Make sure your CTAs and links are easy to click and place intuitively in the email to increase the chances of users following them. Also, make sure your landing pages are responsive to get the most clicks.
Avoid using images that are too large, as they can slow down Reduce email load time for recipients using mobile data to get your newsletter.
Always test your newsletter across multiple devices and email clients. You’ll quickly see how your design elements display on different screens and clients like Gmail and Outlook, and how clearly your CTA displays in the body of the email email.

Define your newsletter content

An essential part of email design is the content that appears in the newsletter. Yes, this may sound obvious, but it’s still forgotten by many who think that an eye-catching design is enough to wow their contacts.

Adapt your newsletter message

Whether it’s inspired by other newsletters. or conducting a survey, carefully plan the messages you want to share and consider how you will communicate them to your audience. Define your email voice and the stories you want to tell, paying close attention to your copy.

Need some content ideas for your newsletter? Here are a few:

Promoting the latest blog articles.
Curated content from around the web.
New gifts such as podcasts, guides, white papers, studies, etc.
Invitations to seminars, webinars and other events.</p
Special marketing campaigns such as advent calendars, annual calendars, etc.

Remember that the content you share in your emails it should be directly linked to your goals and objectives. Newsletters are one of the few types of email that can draw attention to multiple pieces of content. But try not to promote too much at once, as most recipients click on the first call-to-action. Put the most important information first and organize the rest into a clear hierarchy.

Create an eye-catching subject line on the right

We’ve talked a lot about how As the saying goes, first impressions really do count when it comes to your subject line. Think about it: if your email is the vault and the content within is the treasure, your subject line is the key.

Remember that tone and language must match with the style of your brand. Be bold and try something new. Being cheeky, using questions, quoting the recipient’s name, or even adding emojis, liven up the subject line and draw attention to your newsletter. Since you’re probably very averse to being labeled a spammer, avoid using words that might set off a spam alarm.

Also, don’t forget your “Sender Name” and preheader. For “Sender’s Name“, don’t just use your company or department name, but make sure it’s easily recognizable.

The preheader summarizes the content of email and motivates the recipient to pay attention to your newsletter.So make sure it works in conjunction with your subject line to entice readers and encourage them to open your email.

How to: Know your audience, personalize, and A/B test to find the best subject lines for your users.

Don’t forget the legal parts

If you’re doing email marketing , must comply with certain legal guidelines. This means that your newsletter must contain an unsubscribe link.

How to optimize your ezine over time

With your content ready to go, it’s time to start sending out your newsletters. As we mentioned before, the easiest way to do this is to use an email marketing service that allows you to build your contact list, create your newsletter design, and send your emails on one platform, like Mailjet.

Understanding email metrics

Be sure to choose a service that offers tools to track and analyze the newsletters you send. It’s important to see how your audience responds to the emails you send them. Most email newsletter services offer delivery tracking, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes, which are essential for measuring your efforts.

Here are the main metrics explained:

Open Rate: The percentage of subscribers who opened the newsletter.
Click-through Rate (CTR ): The percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link or CTA.
Conversions and/or revenue per click: the percentage of readers who executed the desired after clicking on the landing page (purchasing, downloading, reading the blog article, etc.).
Rate Unsubscribe – The percentage of users who unsubscribed from the newsletter.

Optimize future newsletters with Mailjet’s campaign reporting tool .

Once you’ve sent out your first few newsletters, opens and clicks should They wanted to give you an initial idea about how your audience reacts to your emails. This data is a great source for deciding how to optimize your future newsletters, as it tells you which elements of your newsletter can be changed.

Make sure you know how to read email statistics correctly and how to identify what needs to be improved. If your open rate is low, maybe your subject line isn’t clear enough. If only a few people click the links in your newsletter, try to make your CTA stand out more. If many users unsubscribe, take another look at your contact list or try grouping your contact list into more specific segments for more targeted targeting.

Use this data to determine the exact performance of your newsletter informative and make any adjustments to individual items. We recommend always implementing these settings using A/B testing. Tracking the results and optimizing your newsletters should be an ongoing process that you keep doing to continually improve your results. Even when you achieve positive results, try to aim even higher and find things that can be made even better. For example, try experimenting with different fonts, colors, or the number of images.

Finding the best time to send your newsletter

The time your newsletter is sent is a crucial factor for success. If you’re new to email marketing, try it out at different times. Testing and comparing the results of newsletters sent at different times is the best way to find out what works for your business.

In most cases, there are some basic rules about the best time to send emails. that you can follow for best results. If you work in the B2B sector, you should send your newsletter during regular business hours. Peak hours are usually between 10 and 11 in the morning and between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. If your business model is B2C, you must send during the week between 6 and 9 p.m. m. and on weekends.

Of course, there are many different tools that can be useful. Use web analytics software like Google Analytics and analyze the exact time customers visit your website. Send your newsletter at or shortly before peak activity, since potential recipients are interested in your topic and/or are on their computer at the time.

Google Analytics shows the best time to send your newsletter.

You can also try to find the best time for your company’s newsletter. Weekly and monthly newsletters are the most popular, but that doesn’t mean you should set this email frequency by default. Find what works best for your business. For example, recruitment or real estate may look for daily emails to promote their new listings. Keep an eye on your engagement metrics to understand what works best for your subscribers.

Want to learn more about optimizing your email newsletter over time? Check out our Growth Email Campaigns Playbook, a database of over 60 tactics to help you increase the performance of your email campaigns.

Sample Email Newsletters for Inspiration

Want to see some of these tips in action? We’ve got a whole blog post with 50 newsletter examples for you to check out, but we’ve also curated four of our favorites below so you can get inspired and learn the basics.

Check them out below. !

Product Hunt

The great thing about Product Hunt is how they use their brand identity to their advantage, using their red signature to make their CTA stand out. highlight. on white background.

Product Hunt features a key element, which is placed first and adds value in depth for those avid readers who always want to scroll down. Its text-to-image ratio is also on point, as the use of its visual elements aligns perfectly with the brand identity.

See the full-size Product Hunt newsletter.

Netflix</h3

Oh yeah, did we mention we love Netflix yet? Netflix uses personalized content to make sure their readers keep coming back to their newsletter and find real value in it.

Also, check out their smart use of calls to the action! Not everyone will be ready to enjoy when the email from Netflix arrives. But by adding a combination of ‘Play’ and ‘My List’, they maximize your click-through rates and potential conversion.

Netflix is one of our all-time favorites.

Skyscanner

When someone signs up for Skyscanner’s newsletter, they usually know what they’re looking for. Wanderlust-inducing articles with travel tips and suggestions to help us daydream about being somewhere other than the office… And oh man, do they deliver. >

There’s no question about the value Skyscanner content delivers, making your newsletter a great way to nurture leads until they’re ready to convert. And when they are, they’ll find personalized offers to inspire and encourage them to click through.

Fitbit

At Fitbit, they have a clear goal in mind with their newsletter informative: drive traffic to your blog. The content is meant to inspire readers to be more active and get the most out of their device. So, they highlight the value of your content at the top (“Top Articles Picked for You”) and smartly present your articles with a responsive design that’s easy to read (and click!) on mobile.

See the full-size Fitbit Newsletter

Send awesome email newsletters with Mailjet

Oh yeah. This is where we try to convince you how badly you need Mailjet… Well, you do!

As we said before, sending out newsletters requires the right email partner that ‘ We’ll make it easy to create, send and track your email performance, and that’s what we do very well (like, very well).

With Mailjet, you’ll be You will be able to build and manage your email lists using our subscription widget and contact list management features. Plus, you’ll be able to carefully segment your database to deliver content your readers actually want to read.

If you haven’t already, try our drag-and-drop Email Editor that will help you take advantage of our incredible library of templates. Alternatively, create your designs from scratch in the interface to create stunning responsive emails that look great on all devices.

Once your email is sent through With our interface, via SMTP or our flexible APIs, you can monitor and optimize performance efficiently. Use our detailed Email Statistics, A/B Testing, and Campaign Comparison tools to help you take your email to the next level.

Want to learn everything Mailjet has to offer? Check out all our features here!