How To Make A Newsletter? Definition And Guide

In marketing, emailing represents the greatest source of return on investment, also called ROI. According to a study, this tool would be 40x more effective than social networks in attracting new customers. Enough to make you want to start creating a newsletter . But be careful, you should not make a newsletter just to do like everyone else. You may get inconclusive results. Designing a newsletter will take time. Like any marketing action, you must work on your emailing strategy.

But where to start ? What steps to follow to create an effective newsletter? We tell you everything in this article.

What is a newsletter? Definition

A newsletter is a communication tool that allows you to send information by email.

It has several vocations:

  • It allows you to inform a contact about the activity of a company or about its news.
  • It allows to highlight commercial and promotional offers
  • It allows you to make yourself known and gain visibility

It is a widely used tool because, as indicated in the statistics above, emailing represents a low cost compared to what it can bring in.

Why create a newsletter?

Creating a newsletter allows you to:

  • Create a link with your contacts, prospects or customers
  • Retain your customers.
  • Attract new customers
  • Increase your visibility by communicating about you, your values, your products, your new products
  • Drive traffic to your website

1) Define your objectives and your strategy

If you’re reading this article, you probably want to write a newsletter. ?

And why do you want to make a newsletter? You must have a goal in mind.

Not all newsletters have the same objective. Some will seek to convert by addressing prospects, others will seek to build loyalty through personalization and finally others will bring visibility or increase the number of visits to the website.

Once your objectives have been defined, you will be able to work on your strategy.

To advance in your strategy, you must determine your target. By knowing your target you will know what interests them and therefore be sure that they open their emails and that they do not unsubscribe.

A little advice, to help you, make personas . Thanks to the persona, you will be able to clearly identify your target and determine their expectations and needs.

Next, think about the editorial line. How do you address your target? Professional or familiar? Are you going to use the familiarity or the familiarity?

All of these answers will depend on your target. We do not address the same way between a B2B target (professional) and a B2C target (individual).

Your target defined, take the time to develop the themes of your content, that is to say the subjects you will address. Your objectives must be coordinated with the themes chosen.

Then, for your strategy, we advise you to think about the frequency of sending your newsletter. Would you like to send it once a week, twice a week, once a month? It all depends on the content you are going to cover.

Be careful, do not start with too many newsletters, you risk receiving a lot of unsubscriptions. It is preferable that you send a few but with quality content. This does not prevent me from being regular. Being regular allows you to create a link with your contacts and the more you create a link with them, the more they will be eager to receive the newsletter. Of course, for this to work, your content must be worked on. We will come back to the content of the newsletter later in the article.

Finally, the last very important element in your strategy, how will you analyze your results?

Is it via the click rate, the opening rate, a promo code? There are many KPIs you can analyze. Thanks to this, you can improve yourself and know what interests your contact list and what does not. But above all, these are indicators that allow you to know your target better, which is very useful for your entire business strategy (not just for your newsletters).

Also Read: Marketing Automation: Definition Of Terms And Benefits

2) Choose the tool for sending your newsletter

Your strategy in place, you will have to choose a newsletter sending tool.

A piece of advice, avoid sending it via a classic e-mail box like Gmail or Outlook. These are not tools made for mass mailing. You will quickly be limited in the number of mailings per day and in addition you imagine sending emails individually to each person on your contact list? Already, you will be quickly bored but in addition you will waste a lot of time! It’s not automated. With classic e-mail boxes you cannot personalize the email or even have statistics on your sendings. Finally, it is not possible for people receiving the newsletter to unsubscribe when it is legally obligatory according to the GDPR.

We recommend that you choose software that specializes in e-mailing. With these tools, you have access to statistics and you can make a newsletter more attractive visually. There are many. The best known are Mailchimp , Sendiblue , Mailjet or Getresponse. And inevitably the more you take a complete offer, the higher the subscription will be. So do not hesitate to test them. You can rely on criteria such as ergonomics, responsiveness, deliverability, recommendations based on your statistics and other criteria. We invite you to consult their tariff pages. The options are well detailed.

3) Create a contact list

In this third step, you will have to build a contact list.

These contacts must be qualified for the open rate and click-through rate to be high. Don’t buy databases. It will not necessarily correspond to your target and therefore you will get unsubscriptions. And on top of that, you are not going to have relevant results to analyze in order to improve.

It must be people who have subscribed to your newsletter.

How to get subscriptions to your newsletter ?

There are several methods to obtain qualified contacts.

First method, you can put a pop-in on your site or on your blog on which you will include a subscription form. Make a simple form with name, email, a box to collect consent and a brief description of the content of the newsletters.

4) Build the newsletter and write it

Now let’s move on to the step you’ve been waiting for the most: creating the newsletter.

A) Structure

First, you need to develop the structure of your email.

In this structure, we find very important elements that should not be overlooked:

  • The sender’s name: it must be recognizable and it is preferable that it always be the same. You will use it all the time. A practice that is done a lot is to put the name of a person in your company + the name of the brand. This adds personalization and therefore proximity to the person receiving the email. An impersonal object will make you want to click less. While personalizing, the person receiving the email thinks that there is a human behind the email and not a robot.
  • Subject: Like the sender’s name, the subject is one of the first things you see when you receive an email. This is what will make you want to open the email. You need a catchy subject line, not a subject line that describes the content of the newsletter. To help you, ask yourself the following question when you receive an email and open it: What attracted you? What is the title ?
  • The preheader: This is a short text that we also see in the inbox of the reception and which will briefly indicate the content of the email. It will complement the previous elements and invite people to click.

Finally, there must always be a link to unsubscribe in the footer or footer of your newsletter. It is mandatory.

B) Design

The design must correspond to your graphic charter to be consistent in your communication. We advise you to use the colors of your graphic charter and the visual elements that you are used to using. A piece of advice: don’t overdo it. An overly busy newsletter will not make people want to. It will give the impression of an aggressive advertising banner. While the newsletter must allow you to create a link with your contact list. In addition, if you make a complicated design, your newsletter may not be responsive, i.e. not adapt to different screen sizes.

Regarding the structure, favor the text rather than the images. If you include too many images, your newsletter risks ending up in your recipient’s spam. So really emphasize the text. Make a simple newsletter . It’s the message that counts.

C) Writing

For writing, we advise you to write to teach them something or to tell them a story. You have to captivate the reader. Write simple text with short sentences. Also ventilate your text, it must be pleasant to read. And above all, address him using either you or you. He must feel involved.

To finish in your newsletter, don’t forget the call to action(s), ie the button that will lead to your objective. In your button, choose an actionable verb like “discover”. Place the button rather in the middle, not at the end otherwise you risk having fewer clicks.

5) Choose the right time to send the newsletter

Have you finished your newsletter? All you have to do is send it!

But the question is when? It all depends on your target and the sector of activity. For example, between a B2B target and a B2C target, there are differences in the times and days when people check their emails. Best to test on different days and times and see what works. But to start you can base yourself on the known moments that work the most.

For example, it has been shown that the newsletter is more effective during the week than at the weekend or that for a B2B target, it is necessary to avoid sending it on the Friday before the weekend. As soon as you have tested and found a good niche, you can do an editorial plan . On this schedule, you note the frequency of sending, for example every Tuesday at 9am, as well as the theme of your newsletter. Last advice, think about varying your content. The reader of your newsletter will be more attentive if you bring something new.

To conclude, the newsletter is a very effective marketing tool to obtain new customers or to make yourself known. It brings many benefits provided you do it right. Take the time to work on strategy, content, design and writing. Finally, do not hesitate to keep watch to draw inspiration from newsletters that seem effective to you.

Also Read: Improve Your Customer Communication With SMS

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