Newsletters have, for as long as the Internet has existed, been a great tool for achieving one’s business goals.
In recent years, we have witnessed a great proliferation of this medium. However, in our eyes, few are really strategic and well done.
So we thought we would tell you how to create a newsletter that is really a powerful marketing asset for your business.
Continue reading!
How to create a newsletter: 7 steps to follow to avoid mistakes
The experts from thecreative agency Isola di Comunicazione have drawn up a 7-step path to explain how to create a free newsletter and increase your chances of conversion.
Let’s look at them together.
1. Devise a mailing strategy to understand how to create a newsletter
Every business promotion action is nothing without a strategy. This is because, if you want to have concrete results and make sense of your efforts, you need to know what you want to achieve.
Only in this way can you understand whether your e-mail marketing activity is going in the right direction, or whether it needs to be adjusted.
To set up a right strategy, you need to go through several steps. The first is to determine the goals you want to achieve. In fact, the ultimate goal of a newsletter campaign may be far from simply selling products and/or services.
In particular, you can use this medium to:
- Create a closer relationship with your customers;
- Expand your business by attracting users interested in your field and then turning them into actual customers;
- Bringing more traffic to your website.
Whatever your personal goal is, only once you have put it down on paper can you move on to setting your strategic choices. Specifically:
- Identify your buyer persona, i.e., a prototype recipient you want to target;
- Choosing the right tone of voice with which to communicate your messages;
- Understand what is the optimal mailing frequency: daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly?
- What kind of added value do you want to convey through your newsletter-in other words, why would a user subscribe? Do you convey exclusive content such as personalized promotions, or do you disseminate new blog articles in a more targeted way?
2. Choose the online tool to rely on
Classic e-mail services such as Gmail and Outlook are not suitable for optimal mailing list management, especially if you have a very long contact list. Therefore, it is essential to choose the best-performing newsletter creation tool suitable for your needs.
Different ones exist on the Internet. Among the most famous we mention 3:
- Mailchimp
- Getresponse
- Sendinblue
Each has its own characteristics that you need to evaluate and experience. Basically, they all offer a very similar service. Indeed:
- give you the ability to profile contacts
- allow you to customize the graphics, font, font size and color
- bring you a set of useful data to analyze the performance of your e-mail marketing activity
Choose based on how intuitive the tool is to your mindset. Only then can the newsletter become a marketing asset and not a hindrance that brings stress and wastes valuable energy.
3. Have a registration form for contact collection.
Let’s start to get into the more technical aspects and think about the registration form through which a user can leave his or her contact information and subscribe to the newsletter.
In fact, this small form is indispensable. In its absence, it would be impossible to obtain new e-mail addresses to which to forward our messages.
Usually, all online tools for creating a newsletter make this available among the services they offer. Even better: platforms such as Mailchimp or Getresponse already automatically give you an up-to-date means of GDPR regulations on the processing of personal data
What you need to take care of is its customization.
By now, when we talk about newsletters, we always have a certain distrust. Very often, we find our inbox full of e-mails to which we have not subscribed. This behavior not only annoys us, but it is also illegal and invades our privacy. In order not to frighten the audience browsing your channels, the appearance of the registration form should be consistent with the rest of your business communication.
So, worry about changing its appearance in continuity with your website. Also:
- Choose a call-to-action (i.e., an invitation to subscribe) that suits your audience;
- Define how to sign up: do you want users to get a confirmation email with a link to click? This could be useful, because it makes an initial skim and brings you contacts who are really interested in your content.
- Integrate it into your website. You can accomplish this either through a link or by inserting a portion of html code.
In this regard, find out about our lead generation service.
4. Profiling contacts based on their characteristics
Before moving on to the operational and creative phase of how to create a newsletter, one last step remains to be performed: contact profiling. If you are now creating a newsletter from scratch, chances are that you have a portion of email addresses collected in the past, and a portion collected through the form we have just analyzed.
For the latter, it is simpler. In fact, when registering you can ask the user to enter the personal information you are interested in. For example:
- age
- date of birth
- genre
- city of residence
- interests
In contrast, previously and manually collected contacts must be entered “by hand,” or imported through excel files.
In both cases, profiling is critical because it allows you to break down your mailing list into subcategories and send personalized messages. For example, an automatic email with a discount code on a birthday.
5. Create a template consistent with other corporate communication channels
Here we come to the actual creation of the message. The first action to be taken is the development of the template. Most likely, this should be done on a one-time basis. However, it is necessary to repeat it in case of changes to the corporate image.
The best way to do this is to maintain consistency with your graphic identity. Therefore, you need to recreate a page as similar to your Web site as possible. This way, the user has the perception that he is receiving in his inbox anappendage of your company and not something completely different that he barely recognizes. Also to this end, remember to include your logo as well.
Useful insights:
Famous advertising logos: 5 cases where the logo made a difference
Corporate Logo Creation Service
6. Writing copy
Writing the copy (i.e., the text) of an email is complicated business that presupposes in-depth knowledge of copywriting.
Our advice to you is to use the inverted pyramid technique.
In other words, rank the content from most to least important and put them in order of relevance. By doing so, readers can find what they are interested in right away and delve into the rest only if they want to. In addition, you use the low attention span that people give to online content to your advantage.
In fact, every day we all receive hundreds of e-mails. When we write one you must therefore ask yourself: why should a user read it? You give them a good reason :
- Write a subject line that truly reflects the content of the message
- Keep paragraphs short and interesting
- Include in-depth links that are useful to the customer and functional for your business
- Always leave cross-references to your channels in order to create a closer relationship with the reader
- Make call-to-actions obvious and eye-catching
The guides of Isola:
Writing empathetic web content: a mini-guide to find out how to do it
Content is king: the importance of content marketing in digital
Persuasive copywriting
7. Monitor the results and revise the strategy
Once the newsletter is sent, let 24 hours pass and analyze the results obtained.
As explained in the previous paragraphs, online e-mail marketing tools offer this service.
Here then is a small glossary to understand what the given parameters mean:
- Open rate = The percentage of people who, after receiving your email, actually opened it.
- Delivery rate = The percentage of addresses on your mailing list to which your message was delivered.
- Clicks on CTAs = How many users clicked on the call-to-actions you entered.
- Clicks on links = How many readers opened the links indicated in the email copy.
- Newsletter unsubscription = How many contacts, after reading the newsletter, decided to unsubscribe from the service because they were uninterested.
- New sign-ups = Well-constructed e-mail marketing generates word of mouth and leads more people to leave their contact information.
It goes without saying that if one of these values is not optimal or satisfactory, it becomes necessary:
- modify the initial strategy
- retrace the 7 steps just seen
- monitor again
The benefits of the newsletter for businesses
Following these steps on how to create a newsletter-and doing it for free-can allow you to have a tool that offers numerous benefits. In fact, e-mail marketing allows you to reach consumers in a more targeted way and directly in their inbox. In this way you can:
- Create customized promotions of your products and/or services
- Establish a deeper connection with readers and turn them into regular customers
- Communicating corporate initiatives, such as charitable projects
- Better disseminate the content you publish on the blog
- Generate more qualified traffic to your website
How to create a newsletter: contact Isola di Comunicazione
Taking advantage of all these benefits is possible, but knowing how to create a newsletter is not enough. In fact, it is essential to have expertise in several subjects such as:
- the writing content for the web, to make the text fluent and effective
- the creation of landing pages, to back up what is said in the email with a digital medium that leads the user to conversion (thus, purchase or contact request)
- the web design, to ensure that your corporate image is truly coordinated
Thus, it is clear that an amateur e-mail marketing activity can only yield amateur results and does not allow the full potential of this tool to be exploited.
Isola di Comunicazione is the web agency that gathers in its Team more than 10 people specialized in digital disciplines to offer you the e-mail marketing service as complete as possible.
Ask us now for your free, customized quote and turn this marketing action into a powerful asset for your business!
