By: Fadiki Adegboi
Introduction
As a business owner, creating an email newsletter is an essential part of your overall marketing strategy that can help you achieve future sales. A website visitor who finds your product expensive can be persuaded by receiving a discount delivered to their inbox. A user who forgets about your product can be reminded through a targeted email campaign. A potential buyer who needs more information can learn about your company’s story through weekly broadcasts before clicking the purchase button. By capturing an email from a potential customer, the purchase process today can be postponed to tomorrow.
11 Steps to Create a Newsletter
Learn how the newsletter can help your business grow
Define your newsletter’s goal
Determine your email newsletter strategy
Choose your newsletter platform
Select a design template and customize your newsletter theme
Set your newsletter sending schedule
Encourage people to sign up on your website and through social media
Personalize your automated email flow
Comply with privacy regulations and email best practices
Deliver your first newsletter
Assess your analytics
Start building your newsletter one subscriber at a time
Learn How the Newsletter Can Help Your Business Grow
64.1% of small businesses use email marketing. If you are a business owner wanting to learn how to create a newsletter and start your email marketing strategy, this guide will help you.
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Building Connections with Potential and Former Buyers
According to research by Bluecore, 74% of Baby Boomers and 64% of Millennials consider email to be the most personal marketing channel. While marketing strategies such as social media marketing, content marketing, and paid marketing can seem broad, emails can be customized for individual subscribers. Additionally, emails are sent directly to someone’s inbox, establishing a direct connection. This is important when considering how people make purchasing decisions – many buyers prefer to establish a personal connection with brands before purchasing.
Sending emails to customers that provide value – whether that’s monetary value through discounts or informational value through compelling stories or insights – builds trust that can ultimately lead to purchases. Well-crafted newsletters can build empathy for your brand, which can be a powerful force in the competitive business world.
Building Consideration for Purchase
If a customer lands on your digital store and decides not to buy, they are likely not to return. However, if you capture their email before they leave your website, you can continue to communicate with them through newsletters delivered to their inbox. Email newsletter marketing is a way to keep the conversation going after a potential customer leaves your site, thereby building future purchase consideration.
Using
Discounts and Updates Channel
Discounts and promotional prices can be a strong incentive for customers to purchase your products. On Shopify, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, 47 million shoppers spent $6.3 billion. While not every day can be a massive sales event, you can selectively use an email newsletter to send out promotional codes or announce upcoming sales. For the potential customer who hesitates to buy, a promotional email offering a 10% discount can be the push they need to make a purchase.
Adopting an Owned Channel
Organic reach on social media has been declining for years, replaced by a pay-to-play model – the average organic reach of a social media post on Facebook is about 5%. Between constantly changing algorithms and crowded public spaces online like trending topics on Twitter and busy news feeds on Facebook, it’s hard to stand out on social media. While paid marketing, such as Facebook ads and Instagram ads, can work, they become costlier and reach fewer customers as competition for keywords increases.
Email is an owned channel where you can speak directly to your customers. Once you have an email list of people who have signed up to receive your updates, you own that list, regardless of whether you use an email platform like Mailchimp or ConvertKit. Email gives you a direct line of communication with potential customers that other channels do not offer.
Understanding How Newsletters Can Help You Grow Your Business
It’s crucial to take some time to define specific goals about the content you will send to subscribers and what you want to achieve with your email marketing. Do you want to foster a personal relationship with readers through behind-the-scenes business stories? Is the purpose of this send to share useful information relevant to your product? Are you aiming to promote an upcoming sale? Professionalism. The newsletter can be used for direct promotion of your products and services. Be the curator, and showcase new products or best-selling items in your newsletter to drive traffic to your website. Occasionally offer time-limited discounts and promotional prices to subscribers. Referrals. The newsletter can be a tool for creating ambassadors. Provide an affiliate link to email subscribers to help spread the word about your business in exchange for a reward. For example, offer a 10% code for their friends and give them 10% off their next purchase for each successful referral. This can be especially effective for subscription-based businesses with recurring revenue. Feedback and customer research. Use the newsletter to solicit customer feedback and conduct user research. Instead of using a no-reply email (for example, no-reply@company.com), use an email that readers can reply to for direct contact. Alternatively, send short surveys for readers to answer.
You don’t have to choose just one goal for your newsletter. On the flip side, your newsletter doesn’t need to achieve every goal on the list. Identify and prioritize some goals and consider how to use your newsletter content to achieve them. For instance, you might have an educational newsletter that gives readers a referral link at the bottom. Additionally, you can send a promotional email once every two months. Understand the type of newsletter content that will serve the business goals you wish to achieve and plan your email marketing strategy accordingly.
Defining
Your Newsletter Strategy
Defining your newsletter strategy may seem serious and confusing, but it actually just means outlining a few details about your newsletter before you start sending emails. For instance, consider the people you hope to reach, the audience segments for whom you will create content, the topics you will cover, how people will sign up to receive updates, and how you will schedule the email sends to subscribers. These details will help you shape an email marketing strategy that you can develop over time.
Identifying Your Audience
Your audience is the group of people you are trying to reach and engage through your newsletter. If you are a business owner aiming to ultimately support your business through email marketing, this audience will likely include potential buyers and/or previous customers. But what are the defining characteristics of these people? You probably have a defined ideal customer persona for your business that could also be the perfect audience for your newsletter – for example, tech-savvy millennial parents with young children living in North America with a household income of $100,000 or more. By identifying the people you want to reach and convert through your newsletter, you can create better content for that audience.
Narrowing Your Audience Segments
Segmenting your audience means sending targeted emails to specific segments of your email list. This allows for a level of customization and personalization that better serves the readers. For instance, you might have an email list of 1000 subscribers, consisting of a customer segment of 750 subscribers receiving updates about prescription and sunglasses and 250 subscribers receiving only updates about sunglasses. Email segmentation helps avoid email fatigue or losing subscribers through information that is less relevant to them.
Subscribers can be segmented by asking them for the topics they are interested in when signing up for the newsletter and sending emails according to their interests. On a technical level, newsletter platforms make it easy to segment your list and automate this process. However, the challenge in segmenting email is creating content for each segment, which can be time-consuming as a business owner. You should aim to experiment with segmentation as a long-term strategy as your newsletter list grows, but generally, you should start with a single list to begin.
Identifying Your Topics
Define your content strategy and the specific topics you will cover in your newsletter. The type of content you write should be based on the goal of your newsletter. If you are selling specialty dinnerware and cooking tools, you might choose topics like how to prepare the perfect dinner party or educational tips on keeping your kitchen tools in good shape. Choose topics that are relevant to your readers and encourage them to open your emails rather than leaving them unread. You don’t need to think about all the topics you will cover at once. However, it can be helpful to develop an email content calendar where you plan your email content a few weeks in advance.
Identifying Email Capture Points
Think about the locations where people will be able to enter their email addresses and sign up for your newsletter. For example, visitors to your website can fill out a form to subscribe from the homepage. If you have a blog, encourage people to sign up through a pop-up on the page or a form at the bottom. Include a link to subscribe to your newsletter in the bio section of your company’s social media platforms. If a customer makes a purchase and enters their details at checkout, also encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter. Be intentional and consider how to build your email list through multiple capture points.
Identifying
Email Sending Schedule
Finding the right rhythm for sending newsletters is part art and part science. You don’t want to drown people in emails, so the updates feel special when they hit someone’s inbox. But you also don’t want to send emails so infrequently that you aren’t in mind when it’s time to buy or recommend. Additionally, consistency is key – commit to sending them on the same days of the week and avoid setting a rhythm that you can’t maintain.
By taking some time to define your email marketing strategy, you can be intentional about how you handle your newsletter and see results that impact your business.
Encourage People to Subscribe on Your Website and Social Media
Your goal is to gather newsletter subscribers from here and there who are already engaging with your business, such as on your website and through social media. Get newsletter subscribers by including sign-up forms across all your marketing and sales channels.
Customize Your Automated Email Flow
Most newsletters you send will be written manually and sent weekly with interesting information, relevant updates, and new offers. However, there are a few emails that can be automated, such as a welcome email or an unsubscribe email. These messages are important for creating a first and last impression, and it’s essential that they are on point.
For the welcome message, thank new subscribers for signing up, outline what they can expect from the readership, and share any relevant links. Teddy Fresh, a youth clothing brand based in Los Angeles created by YouTuber and artist Hila Klein, welcomes new subscribers to their list with a branded introductory message that directs readers to the site.
If someone unsubscribes from the email list, they have customized their goodbye screen with their logo and brand colors.
Make sure every touchpoint feels authentic and connected to your brand. In addition to welcome messages, you might request new subscribers’ birthdates and send an automatic birthday discount to each subscriber. Apply the same principles of personalization and a personal touch to every automated email you send.
Compliance with Privacy Regulations and Email Best Practices
Email addresses are the equivalent of cell phone numbers and have their own set of rules…
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