How to Create an Email Newsletter — Quick Guide
Style Factory
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In this post I’m going to show you how to create an email newsletter.
Despite the rise of social media and online advertising, email marketing remains incredibly effective, offering a fantastic return on investment.
In fact, according to HubSpot, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $36. Moreover, with email users expected to reach 4.7 billion by 2026 (Statista), it’s clear that email will continue to be a highly popular communication channel.
Right, let's dive in with the first step to creating an email newsletter: getting organized.
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1. Organize your data
Before you think about ‘how’ you are going to send an email newsletter, you need to think about the ‘who’ – the individuals that you’d like to communicate with.
In order to send the most relevant e-newsletters that generate the most revenue, you need as good an email marketing database as possible.
Now, a lot of businesses have their contacts’ email addresses tucked away in a messy spreadsheet somewhere – or more likely, spread across several very messy spreadsheets!
Or, it might even be the case that a lot of email addresses have been captured in physical format — for example, in application forms, customer files and other types of paperwork.
Regardless of where your email addresses live, it’s a good idea to digitize and consolidate all of them into one clean, well-organized database before you try to send any newsletters to the contacts on them.
Tools like Excel and Google Sheets make it easy to do this — just create a new spreadsheet using either tool, and enter your email addresses into it.
While doing this, ensure that you segment your contacts as well as you can. This means putting a column in your spreadsheet that you use to categorize people as leads, current customers, past customers and so on.
Doing this will give you the ability to send more targeted email newsletters in future.
When you’ve finished this preparation, you should have a spreadsheet that contains all your cleaned, segmented data in one place.
This is your mailing list, which can now be uploaded to an email marketing app.
2. Get an email marketing app
Many small business owners think that sending e-newsletters means compiling a list of email addresses, copying and pasting them into the BCC field of a normal email message, and hitting the send button.
This is a very time-consuming way to go about things — and it’s also ineffective, because it doesn’t allow you to send professional-looking email newsletters, prevents you accessing newsletter analytics and increases the likelihood that your newsletters will trigger spam filters.
Accordingly, it is a much better idea to use a dedicated email marketing app for sending your e-newsletter — one that lets you send ‘HTML newsletters.’
HTML newsletters, as their name suggests, use HTML code to display text and graphics. This means that the resulting newsletters are attractive and on-brand.
It’s important to note however that email marketing apps don’t require you to know anything about HTML code to use them — you simply use their drag and drop tools to design your newsletter, and all the necessary HTML is automatically created in the background for you.
Now, there are many web-based solutions that you can use to send HTML newsletters. Popular options include GetResponse, AWeber, Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.
You can access free trials of some of these below:
3. Choose a template
Once you’ve decided on which email marketing app you’re going to use, you need to sort out how your email newsletters are going to look.
Helpfully, email apps typically provide a wide range of professionally-designed templates that you can use as the starting point for your newsletter design.
Once you’ve picked a template, you can then tweak its design elements using a drag and drop editor.
You can then save and reuse this as your own template for your future newsletters.
4. Add your content
Once you’ve picked a newsletter template, it’s time to add your content.
Generally speaking, it’s best to focus on one call to action here, rather than populating your newsletter with lots of competing offers.
Decide on the most important thing to communicate, and do so clearly using simple language and attractive images.
5. Test your newsletter carefully
At this point you should have a newsletter template sorted and a nicely crafted message.
However, before you hit the send button, you need to run a couple of tests on your newsletter.
First, you need to make sure that it will arrive safely in inboxes and not in a spam folder.
Professional email marketing solutions always let you send test versions of your newsletters, so use this functionality to send a test message to a few different types of email apps – for example, Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo Mail.
Check each app to ensure that your message is not being flagged as spam.
You’ll also need to check that your email newsletter is displaying correctly in all contexts.
Sometimes an email that looks great in Outlook can look terrible in Gmail, or the desktop version of a message can look fantastic, while the mobile version is all messed up.
So, always check that your message is displaying nicely across a wide range of devices and email programs before sending it out.
Six — hit the send button (and measure success!)
Once you’re happy that your newsletter is displaying nicely across a variety of email apps and device types, you can send your message.
But even when your message is sent, there’s still a bit of work to do: you need to measure the success of your newsletter.
Most e-newsletter tools come with comprehensive reporting functionality – after sending an e-newsletter, you should be able to access statistics that let you measure their performance.
The key things you’ll need to look at are open rates, clickthrough rates and unsubscribe rates.
You can use these statistics to help you create better newsletter content and subject lines that generate more conversions in future.
Wrapping up
And that’s it! I hope you’ve found our guide on how to create an email newsletter helpful.
However, there’s lots more to learn about how to send great e-newsletters, so do make sure you check out our full guide to creating newsletters on the Style Factory blog.
Also, a reminder that you can try out some of the leading email marketing platforms via their free trials below:
For more tips on digital marketing and setting up an online business, you can download our free Business e-kit here.
And if you have any questions about email newsletters, just leave them in the comments section. We read all queries and will do our best to help.
Email marketing resources
Check out some of our reviews and comparisons of key email marketing platforms below:
This article was written by Chris Singleton. Additional research by Matt Walsh.