The Basics Of Creating An Email Newsletter

When creating an email newsletter, there are a lot of things to juggle, from copy to visual assets and audience segmentation. Once you have the basics down and a template sorted, your email newsletter campaigns will be established, allowing you to make the most of your email marketing efforts. In fact, customers like to hear from their favourite brands with 49% of consumers saying they like receiving regular email updates from their go-to brands. So how can you create a killer email newsletter?

1. Goals

Firstly, you need to establish a goal for your email campaigns. Do you want to build your email newsletters for lead generation? To build brand awareness? Or perhaps to increase website traffic? Think about your overall business strategy and figure out how email marketing will tie into your overarching business objectives.

2. Content

Next, it is time to plan out your email marketing content. You can actively or passively find content for your newsletter campaigns. Actively, you can discover content that lines up with specific goals you have set for your campaigns. Passively, you may stumble across informative content by accident that ties in nicely with your emails.

Depending on the frequency you decide to send your emails, you can plan content for the month, ahead of time or you may have time in between to find and build content for your email marketing. It is good to keep some degree of flexibility in case you have last minute news you want to share!

3. Template

Creating your email newsletter template is one of the most important steps when it comes to creating your campaigns. Once you are happy with your template you can easily edit it to incorporate new content for each send – it is worth taking the time to ensure it is how you want it to look.

You don’t need a really fancy or busy design to run successful email campaigns, as long as it incorporates your branding, is easy to read and navigate, you will find it is successful. Take a look at these 18 examples of great email newsletters for some inspiration! Most email platform providers have free templates you can use and edit as part of their service.

4. Personalisation

Next, you need to segment your data into the right audience for your newsletter campaigns. Think about the type of audience you want to target and at what point of the customer journey they are at. This will impact the type of content you want to push out to them. To new customers, perhaps you could send out an initial offer to get them to convert and for existing customers, you may wish to send out high-quality content to maintain loyalty.

Personalisation is key, whether that be adding the first name merge field in your email campaigns or personalising the type of content you send to different customer bases you have. The more you highly personalise your content, the better results you will see.

5. Analyse the data

The best way to create a successful email marketing campaign is to closely monitor the data after each send. Analyse how the subject line, content, call to actions, time of day and other variables impact the key metrics. Think about the open rate, click-through rate, conversions and unsubscribes to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns.

We hope you are now armed with all the knowledge to create a killer email newsletter campaign. If you need some more inspiration take a look at our top 10 tips on improving your email marketing campaigns! Get in touch with us today for all things digital marketing and website design.