How To Write A Good Newsletter

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Even though email newsletter is one of the most common types of emails sent by brands, they are some of the hardest to do. To create effective email newsletters, you need great content, which is tailored to your audience. This newsletter content could be either entertaining, educating, convincing or pursuing.

🚀 Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀

Newsletters are important parts of your communication strategy. You may think that emails are so 2005 but contrary, they are still great and commonly used. They increase conversion and ROI, build trust with your audience, drive traffic to your site and easily drive attention to your offer.

Before we explain how to write a good newsletter, let’s start from the basics.

Picture 1. Newsletter example

What is Email Newsletter?

An email newsletter is a type of email used to keep customers informed about the company or product updates. 

Brands use them to promote new products, generate a unique sale, and enhance    customer engagement through personalized offers. On the other side, corporations use it as a source for internal communication.

Simply, it is an effective way to build a relationship between a customer and a brand. Because the goal is to keep customers connected and informed even when they are not buying anything.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a tool for building and nurturing customer relationships. This tool is also helpful when building brand awareness and generating leads. Some of the benefits of email marketing are:

• produces a higher response rate
• quick and immediate communication
• it helps your SEO
• builds stronger customer relationships
• it is a cost-effective method to test a variety of marketing content
• cheaper and faster than traditional mail

For every 1$ you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of 42$. That’s how important email marketing is. 

Read Top Email Marketing Trends for 2021.

Newsletters As Essential Part of Email Marketing Strategy

As email marketing outperformed other online marketing strategies, it is no surprise newsletter are so important. Large companies and brands use email newsletters as part of an email marketing strategy.  Because it helps them to increase profit and to nurture contacts with their customers. 

Picture 2. Marketing strategies ratings

Newsletters As Essential Part of CX

Customer experience is one of the most important aspects of every business. And sometimes it is hard to achieve a great CX. The newsletter can help with that. By keeping the design simple, using call-to-action buttons, offering discounts, you can keep customers. 

When talking about discounts, they are a great way of keeping email subscribers interested. If you want to learn how check our other article about it: 5 Tips on Keeping Your Email Subscribers Interested and Engaged.

9 Steps to Write a Good Email Newsletter

1. Define the Goal and Specifics of Your Newsletters

When defining the goal of your newsletter, it is important to ask yourself a few questions first:

• What do you want to achieve with your email newsletter? 
• What is the goal of your marketing efforts? 
• Do you want from the subscribers to buy something? 
• Is your purpose to educate your readers? 

Answering these questions is crucial. Your email newsletter content must align with these goals.

2. Share Valuable Content

Chances are, your email newsletter subscribers don’t want to hear about your products and services 100% of the time. People like to be informed of sales but selling shouldn’t be the primary focus of an email newsletter.

Therefore, balance your newsletter content to be 90% educational and 10% promotional.

Focus on sending your subscribers educational, relevant, timely information. Unless you have exciting news about your product, service, or company, leave out the promotional parts.

Download Free, Responsive Email Newsletter Templates and upgrade your e-mail marketing strategy!

Picture 3. Paldesk newsletter example

3. Choose Your Primary Call-to-Action

Part of what makes a newsletter a newsletter is that you’re featuring multiple pieces of content with multiple calls-to-action. But, that doesn’t mean you should let those CTAs share equal importance.

Instead, let there be one head CTA. Just one main/important thing that you would like your subscribers to do. The rest of the CTAs should be “in-case-you-have-time” options. Whether it’s simply to click through to see a blog post or just to forward the email to a friend, make it super simple for your subscribers to know what you want them to do.

Related: Importance of CTA in Marketing

4. Use Good and Optimized Images

An interesting photo is a good partner to any well-written article. Therefore, choose an image that best suits your content and makes sure to use a good quality, high-resolution images. But email is a little bit trickier. Most of the time, people won’t have images enabled.

Therefore, you’ve got to make sure your images have one essential component and it’s alt text. Alt-text is the alternative text that appears when images aren’t loaded in an email. This is important if your CTA is images. You want to make sure people are clicking even without the image enabled.

5. Track the Metrics that Help You Reach Your Goals

That’s when your marketing objectives come in. When you know what your KPI is, it’s very easy to see if you managed to achieve what you wanted. Decide which metrics are most useful for your analysis to see how your campaigns perform over time.

Those can be something like total emails sent or delivered, open rate, CTR, conversion, etc. Depending on what your goal is, you will focus more on some metrics than others. That knowledge can help you to tweak your strategy to bring success.

Upgrade your omnichannel marketing efforts with Omnichannel Guide for Digitally Advanced Brands with best brand examples!

Picture 4. Use metrics to bring success

6. Choose the Best Time to Send Your Emails

Maximizing open rates doesn’t only depend on the content. It’s also about choosing the right time to send your newsletter.

Start from imagining your target reader. When do they get up? What are their daily habits? And finally when do they read emails?

If you send it at the wrong time, there’s a huge possibility it could end up lost in a full inbox of all other newsletters your reader has subscribed to.

7. Make Them Short and Simple

Nobody has time to read a 10-pager newsletter. So when you’re compiling content, try to adapt it to a person reading their emails on the go, during a coffee break, or a commute to their job (among tonnes of other emails). 

So try and limit your newsletter to 2-3 important notices, explain them in the shortest and most interesting way possible and you’re up for a great start.

8. Have a Catchy Headline

Even if your subscribers sign up for your emails, there’s no guarantee that they will open your emails once they get them in their inbox. It’s all about grabbing readers’ attention. We receive so many emails each day, they overwhelm us. For this reason, we ignore the ones that aren’t important. By using a catchy headline, you can raise interest.

First impressions are important for establishing any type of relationship, professional or personal. How you introduce yourself to someone can raise or lower the listener’s interest in continuing a conversation. The same goes for your email newsletter’s subject line. If the subject line isn’t compelling, interesting or intriguing, your reader may not even open it.

The perfect example of an effective headline is on the picture below.

Picture 5. Headline example

9. Keep the Design Simple

You don’t want to have your subscribers hang out and read your email all day. You want to send them elsewhere, your website or blog, etc. to consume the whole piece of content. White space is also a key factor in email newsletters. It helps visually alleviate the cluttered feel, and on mobile, makes it much easier for people to click the right link.

It’s a clever step to create a nice email template that you can use over and over. It will save time for you and ensure that the layout will be consistent. There are many built-in templates you can use but you can also create a guideline for this purpose to create a customized and branded layout with an email builder.

Final Thoughts

Grabbing attention is a difficult task in today’s content-heavy world. The secret of successful email marketing is segmenting your audience. Even if you have a great article but it’s totally irrelevant to your recipients, you are wasting time. Make sure you send the right message to the right person. With that in mind, you can easily win a lot by using the right email marketing strategy.

Precise planning and quality content are as important as being reliable and sending newsletters at the right time. The outcome of your email marketing campaigns can be improved by analyzing the data and creating actionable insights. So, use insights to write a successful email newsletter that delivers the value to your subscribers.