How to Write a Newsletter: A Step-By-Step Guide

How to Write a Newsletter

When it comes to email newsletter service, there are many factors to consider, such as proofreading your text, evoking an immediate response, designing it to look good on a variety of devices and environments, and choosing topics that inspire curiosity as well abide by the relevant laws.

Email newsletters can be an important component of your marketing strategy. So, to avoid abuse and make effective use of this tool, you must master the art of writing your newsletter in a unique and standard format.

• Know the purpose of your newsletter

Before you write out an e-mail, you need to have a complete understanding of what you want to achieve with your newsletter and how it plays a role in your content strategy.

Determine if the design of your newsletter is to be linked to other platforms like getting more subscribers’ email addresses, driving traffic to your website and so on. Once a goal has been set, all other elements will move towards the goal.

• Collecting content

Once you’ve set a goal for your newsletter, you need to find the right content for it. Your newsletter will have its publication cycle. If so, you should be able to find the content for your next newsletter within the set publication cycle. There are two ways to find content, active and passive. An active way is to find content that fits your goals while the passive way is to browse through other content and stumble upon something that fits your newsletter goal. You can use the active method, but the passive method can save you a lot of time. Browse the internet and bookmark it from time to time, it saves time.

Everyone will have different ways of gathering content, but the best way to gather content is through your company’s blogs and social media, audience content, internal newsletters, and educational materials.

• Design a template

Before you start thinking about promotional copy, you need to decide what your newsletter should look like. You must think about the design to know how much space you can use for promotions.

Your newsletter template doesn’t have to be flashy. Newsletters don’t have a lot of text and can be made pretty with simple colours. The design of a newsletter is enough to allow readers to browse through and click through the content. Of course, there should be no inconvenience in the mobile environment.

• Decide on the size of your newsletter

Email newsletters do not automatically resize when sent to subscribers. That is not to say the different screen sizes and resolutions on different devices or programs on which subscribers read the newsletter are not known. However, you can make your newsletter any height or length. Except the design gets weird in a program that reads email. But make sure the email is not too long, else you risk people clicking less. In general, newsletters should be able to reach the end of content in less than two scrolls.

• Add marketing text to the body content

The next thing is to fill the template with text and pictures. This part is the main part of the newsletter, so you need to be very careful to make it perfect. Oftentimes, newsletters keep their copy short to get people to click. Create a catchy ad copy that will grab your audience, and if you have an image that matches it, consider adding it.

All text in the newsletter must go through a thorough review process. It’s also a good idea to show your fellow teammates to look. While keeping in mind that newsletters, unlike web content, cannot be edited once viewed.

• Personalize and add smart content

A well-crafted promotional content feels like a personal letter to that person. It’s like collecting things your friend might be interested in and sending them out in a newsletter. When such a newsletter is received, your audience not only clicks on it but shares it with others as well. To make your newsletter feel like a personalized letter, you need to do the following:

Segment the newsletter area and put content that people like for each group. Also, with the marketing resources you have, you can add some personalized tokens, because too much detail can scare your subscribers.​

Adding smart content means showing some readers that you are A and showing others that you are B. Readers can see a call to action as talking to a sales rep, or as instructions on how to get tickets to a customer-only event. Since these readers have little interest in other calls to action, smart content will lead them to the right message.

• Pay attention to the title

When you are sending your newsletter, be sure to send it in the name of a real person to get a high open rate and high click-through rate. You can also test yourself to see how the sender’s name works. In order not to confuse the reader with which one to choose, it should be written so that they know who the sender is.

The title is a bit tricky. There are several ways to create a title you want to click on. To start with, you can use the best titles that have been proven to work, and then you can do your tests to see which titles your readers like.

• Use content that supports alternate text and plain text

It is important to note that images don’t always display correctly in emails, so you should use alternate text, so your readers know what the image was original. If your call to action is an image, you will have a hard time converting customers. You may have opened an email, but the HTML may not display properly. That’s why your newsletter should look good even in plain text mode. Make the links easy to click and make the content of the newsletter clear, even if the images are not visible.

• ​Check compliance with the law

Before you hit the Send button, you need to make sure your newsletter is legal. According to the law, when sending commercial advertising information, it must be sent only to those who have consented to receive it, and ‘Advertising’ must be indicated in the subject line. You must also create an unsubscribe link in the body.

In the case of non-profit advertising information, there are cases where it is sent for the benefit of the recipient such as for security, content update reasons or notice of changes to the conditions and characteristics of the service.

• Take the test

Emails are read differently by each service provider. For example, it may look good on one browser and be messy on another. That’s why you should test it on popular browsers and email services.

• ​Send newsletter

This is the singular most important stage. After you’ve ensured that all recipients of your email have signed up to receive them, your newsletter is as intended, and you’re compliant with all the legal requirements, it’s time to click to send the newsletter.

• Analyze and resend

Some time has passed since the publication of the newsletter. Now the data should have arrived, and the next step is to evaluate how your newsletter fared? What are you going to do with the next issue? This data will help you set goals, see how well the first newsletter served that goal, which parts were clicked the most and which parts of the newsletter served that goal the most.

Once you are armed with this data, you have a guideline for your next newsletter. No matter when the next newsletter is published, you have valuable data in your hands for publishing the next newsletter.