Newsletters are one of the best ways to connect your business with your audience.
They can help you nurture leads into customers, drive conversions, and build brand loyalty. They’re so effective that 81% of marketers currently send email newsletters to their audiences.
However, while email newsletters can be effective engagement tools, creating a top-tier newsletter means more than just sending a few lines of text once a week.
To help you avoid falling into that pattern, we’ll show you how to write a newsletter and keep your audience clicking “open.”
Here’s what we’ll cover:
What Sets Newsletters Apart From Other Marketing Strategies?
How To Write a Successful Newsletter
Final Thoughts: How To Write a Successful Newsletter for Your Audience
What Sets Newsletters Apart From Other Marketing Strategies?
Newsletters are an excellent way to establish a direct conversation with your audience to keep them updated and engaged. You can use that opportunity to build solid relationships, share content, and promote sales.
With that in mind, here’s what sets newsletters apart from other marketing strategies:
They Have More Exclusive Benefits
Newsletters are effective ways of launching new products or services. You can give subscribers discounts, sneak peeks, or first dibs on new products. As a result, your audience will feel appreciated and have a clear incentive to stay subscribed.
Let’s say, you’re a real estate agent releasing new houses that have just hit the market to families looking for homes or a storeowner releasing a new line of apparel, then newsletters provide an effective way to make announcements. Not only do they keep your customers in the loop, but they also make them feel like insiders who are getting access to exclusive information.
Here are some more exclusive benefits you can get from email newsletters:
- Excellent source of traffic
- Easy to track metrics
- Deep customer loyalty
- Brand awareness and authority
- Easy to implement, low-cost to operate
They’re More Personal
Effective newsletters focus on personalization since customers want to be treated like people, not just as other contacts.
Newsletters can be a dialogue between you and your recipients, offering them content relevant to their needs and interests and encouraging conversation. You can also get more specific about your newsletter content by segmenting your email subscribers into lists.
In short, part of writing great newsletters is using personalization to your advantage. That way, you can make them:
- Relevant — Subscribers look for relevant and timely information. So, your email content must be educational. You can also include promotions if you have important news about your service, product, or business.
- Interesting — Choose topics that will interest your audience. The subject can be entertaining or funny, speak to the season they’re in, or offer valuable information that can help them solve a problem.
- Valuable — Newsletters should include nuggets of wisdom, tips, and helpful blog posts along the way, so your audience feels like they’re learning something.
How To Write a Successful Newsletter
- Know your audience
- Keep it simple
- Use an email newsletter template
- Use creative subject lines
- Don’t be too persistent
- Tease your newsletter on social media
- Analyze your newsletter data
Here are seven tips to help you write successful newsletters:
1. Know Your Audience
Your newsletters can’t be effective if you don’t know your audience.
What are their problems? How can you solve those problems? How will your product benefit them?
Your audience doesn’t inherently care about your services and products. They care about how your offerings can improve their lives and solve their problems.
So, answering the above questions will help you create customer profiles and audience personas that are specific to the type of people they are. That will make your newsletters relevant since the message will resonate with their interests, needs, and preferences.
With the help of a research tool like Google Trends API, you can easily access thousands of customers’ queries and pain points. Once you understand your audience, create content that aligns with their problems and the solutions you can offer. Send newsletters to your subscribers with educational tidbits, important announcements, sales, and reminders.
A newsletter with original and relevant content will always produce the best results: high open rates and engagement.
2. Keep It Simple
Since your recipients spend less time reading an email than a case study, blog post, or industry news, they should understand the point of your newsletter as soon as they open it. So, keep the content simple. Use short sentences and easy-to-read language.
The nature of a newsletter can easily make it feel cluttered — using concise copy and enough white space in the design will help you fix that.
Concise copy gives your audience a taste of your content. Just enough to entice subscribers to click and learn more. After all, you want readers to take your desired action quickly or send them elsewhere (your website, for example) to read the full content.
Meanwhile, white space helps with visual clarity. However, white space isn’t just to provide visual relief. It also makes it much easier for people to click the correct link on mobile.
Here’s a newsletter example from Totem Road:
ALT: A good newsletter is simple and straightforward.
The clean design has plenty of white space, making it uncluttered and easy to read. The copy is also straightforward, with a clear call to action (CTA).
3. Use an Email Newsletter Template
Using an email template will give you a preview of how your newsletter will look before writing the copy. As a result, you’ll know how much room you have to promote a piece of content.
Screenshot
ALT: Email newsletter template.
It’ll also help you streamline the design process. You’ll only be opening your template and filling in the blanks, which is much easier than starting from scratch every week.
That said, choose an email newsletter software that fits your budget, technical skills, and objectives. And don’t forget to account for your audience’s needs too.
Remember, you can select pre-made templates if you don’t have experience designing emails. They’re easy to use, especially if you’ve previously used a drag-and-drop page editor on a content management system. It can save you a lot of time and energy.
Lastly, go for a mobile-friendly template so your email recipients can adequately read and click on its elements on mobile devices.
4. Use Creative Subject Lines
Recipients will only open your email newsletter if you have an eye-catching subject line. According to Barilliance, 64% of people open their emails based on the subject line. So, try to state your value proposition immediately.
ALT: Use creative subject lines to boost open rates.
Here are some points to consider when creating your subject lines:
- Personalization — An email subject line with the recipient’s name is more likely to get clicked on.
- Value or urgency — What reason are you giving your readers to click on your email once they see it in their inbox? Time limit? An enticing offer? A question they want to be answered?
- Character count — Keep email subject lines to around 30 characters. If browser display limits cut off your subject line, it won’t matter how superb your copy is. Your recipients won’t see it.
Ideally, always A/B test your subject lines to know what works for your audience and ensure you have the best possible open and click-through rates.
5. Don’t Be Too Persistent
You can be tempted to send a newsletter whenever you have a new idea or a minor announcement, but it’s best to exercise restraint.
Sending newsletters often can become annoying and leave a bad taste in your subscribers’ mouths.
On average, newsletters are best sent weekly on the same day and time. SuperOffice shares that the best time to send newsletters is on Tuesdays at 3:00 PM.
ALT: Send newsletters on the same day and time.
But depending on your target audience, industry, and engagement objectives, you may have a different ideal time to send your email newsletters. So, understand your audience’s behavior to know the best time to send your newsletters and inspire them to take your desired action.
That said, whichever time and frequency works for you — once a week or month — make sure your timing is predictable.
6. Tease Your Newsletter on Social Media
Social media can be an excellent source of new subscribers. If you already have followers, you can add regular posts teasing your newsletters and ask them to sign up.
You can also include a link to your newsletter landing page on your social profiles so new followers can easily sign up. For example, you can use your Instagram and Twitter “About” sections to post a link to your email sign-up form.
Also, join relevant subreddits and Facebook groups and become an active member to promote your newsletters.
Here are more ways to get new newsletter subscribers by maximizing your social media efforts:
- Use FOMO tactics to drive curiosity and grab your reader’s attention
- Try social media advertising to add new subscribers to your email list
- Run referral programs and social contests
7. Analyze Your Newsletter Data
A crucial part of your email campaign is what comes after your newsletter is out of your hands and delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. Monitoring data is the best way to measure your newsletter’s impact.
You don’t want to waste time on activities that aren’t yielding meaningful results for your business. So, monitor the following metrics to ensure you have the correct information to guide your marketing campaign:
- Click Through Rate (CTR) — Tracking the number of clicks you get over time is an excellent way to judge whether or not your newsletter is conveying value. If the number is slowly declining, you might want to rethink your newsletter strategy.
- Forward Rate (FR) — If you’re trying to get readers to forward your emails, you need to track how many people are getting the content forwarded to them. However, your forward rate isn’t a fixed number. You’ll need to check several metrics to see how forwards impact your email newsletters and database growth.
- Conversion Rate (CVR) — You usually send emails for people to do something after they click. So, check whether they signed up for an event you advertised, converted on the landing page form, or clicked on a CTA in a blog post.
- Unsubscribe Rate — The percentage of people who opt out of receiving your newsletter in the future. If the rate is high, examine whether your newsletters could be suffering from poor email design, excessive emailing, or too little value.
These metrics will give you a comprehensive view of your newsletter’s performance. Therefore, you’ll be able to determine whether you should invest more time into these email newsletters or change your tactics.
Final Thoughts: How To Write a Successful Newsletter for Your Audience
Email marketing is a tried-and-true method of reaching out to your target audience. And creating a good newsletter is a fundamental part of your email marketing strategy.
Use the tips above for inspiration and make top-tier email newsletters that delight your subscribers.
Do you have more brilliant strategies we haven’t mentioned? Share the post with your answers.
