10 Steps to creating a phenomenal newsletter.
Email newsletters are one of those must have customer connection mediums that any business no matter the industry or size needs. It’s way more than just a marketing channel. It’s the foundational bridge between a brand and its audience. More personal than social media and fully customizable in experience, email newsletters remain critical to any business’s growth.
In this guide, we’ll share ten steps to creating phenomenal newsletters. Plus, we give away a practical email newsletter planning template. Grab this free Notion template below!
Get the free newsletter planning template
A practical and reusable email newsletter planning template. Get this Notion template for free by filling out the form below.
How to Create an Email Newsletter
- Get the right email newsletter tool
- Figure out your newsletter goal
- Create an audience segment
- Pick the perfect newsletter template
- Personalize your content
- Add dynamic or interactive content
- Create mobile vs desktop views
- Add the right sender details
- Preview and send a test
- Send and analyze your results
You’re juggling a lot of balls in the air when you launch an email newsletter. Proofreading the language, making engaging calls-to-action, designing the email to work across mobile and desktop views, developing clickable subject lines — there’s a lot to keep track of. We have made it simple for you. Ten critical items to ensure you send out stellar newsletters every single time.
Step 1: Get the right email newsletter tool
First and foremost: Pick an email newsletter tool that is suitable for your budget, goals, and technical expertise. tinyEmail is by far the most loved email marketing tool out there right now that lets you send beautifully designed, effective newsletters. See how tinyEmail compares with 10 other most popular email marketing tools in this unbiased review.
tinyEmail is super simple to learn and use, with little to no learning curve, especially if you’ve used drag-and-drop page editors on a content management system before. And you can get started right away with a free 30-day trial and a free account after that.
Step 2: Figure out your goal
Before you start crafting your email, make sure you define the aim of the newsletter and how it fits into your overall email marketing strategy. Is the goal of your email to increase visitors to your website? Are you looking to generate sales? Are you looking for a way to promote your new products and services? Determine your goal and let the rest of your choices flow from there.
For each of these goals, establish a list of key performance indicators. Keep in mind that your key performance indicators (KPIs) should go beyond “how many people opened it.” It should be more directly linked to your entire business objectives. The open rate of your email can provide insight into the success of your newsletter, but it shouldn’t be the only metric you track each month.
Step 3: Create the right audience segment
It is very rare that all your customers or your entire audience would be a natural fit for your newsletter. Make sure you segment your audience so that the most relevant subscribers get the content you are sending. Consider creating multiple variations of your newsletter to fit the interests of the different segments. This will ensure better engagement and far fewer unsubscribes or spam complaints.
Mix and match important signals to create the perfect audience segment
Step 4: Pick the perfect newsletter template
It’s time to choose a template once you’ve decided on a goal for your newsletter and which audience segment you want to send it to. tinyEmail includes hundreds of hand-picked templates that have been pre-tested to look great on all devices and are meant to increase engagement. Whichever template you choose, make sure that it represents your brand accurately and it is easy enough to change and edit for every newsletter iteration.
tinyEmail comes with hundreds of gorgeous, hand-picked email templates that are ready for use.
Step 5: Personalize your newsletter content
Good looking templates are a great start. But what really takes it to the next level is personalization. Content that is relevant and aware of each reader’s preference and history with your brand will resonate way more with your readers than a generic email. tinyEmail integrates with hundreds of tools your business already uses and brings in your data for you so you can combine them with email engagement metrics to create the highly personalized messages.
Use right data from your audience and insert them using merge tags.
Step 6: Add dynamic or interactive content
Make your email newsletters stand out among the hundreds of emails your audience receives every day by adding interactive and dynamic content right inside the email. Dynamic content are things like image sliders, content accordions or smart product cards that pull in the latest price, images and description of produces automatically. Or add a countdown timer, a video that plays inside the email or even forms and surveys. tinyEmail supports AMP for email – a technology that allows you to send such interactive components to your newsletter.
Add dynamic & interactive
elements to your email
Step 7: Create mobile vs desktop views
Mobile email opens account for 41.6 percent of all email opens, which is around 25% greater than desktop email opens. This means that while you must ensure that your emails render correctly on mobile devices, it’s also an opportunity to truly customise how your newsletters behave on mobiles versus on desktops.
For instance, you might want to display a QR code for your mobile app on desktops but show the app store button on mobile. You can set up granular mobile and desktop display rules for any email element on TinEmail.
Add mobile-specific rules to your email content
Step 8: Add the right sender details
Sender emails are the email addresses that your recipients see the emails coming from. This can be generic like [email protected] or more personal like [email protected]. Using real human names often work great to form a more human connection. While using sensible email addresses like [email protected] help set the right expectations. Pick what is most relevant to your business and communication practices.
Send your emails from the right person.
Step 9: Preview and send a test
We are getting close! Hang in there. Now that you have created the perfect email newsletter, it is time to preview how your email will look. A few things to always look out for are:
- Is the email rendering correctly on mobile?
- Is the personalization working as expected?
- Are the mobile and desktop views working ?
- Are all the images loading?
- Are there any broken links?
- Are there any grammatical errors?
Preview how your emails will look once sent and send yourself a test.
Step 10: Send and analyze your results
It’s that final moment. Once you are satisfied with your email, it’s time to hit send or schedule your email. And once your email is sent, you will want to see how it performed. The free email newsletter planning template we shared makes it super easy to track the performance of your campaigns along with planning your future emails. Of course, if you are on tinyEmail, we make performance analytics really easy to understand and keep track of.
See how your emails perform - check for opens, clicks, sales and interactions.
Wrapping it up
Following these ten simple steps will ensure your email newsletters follow industry best practices, fosters audience engagement, builds trusts and ultimately generates revenue for hour business. Make sure to download the free email newsletter planning template so you get a head start. Now go ahead and send that stellar newsletter!
