How to Create an Email Newsletter

I'm often asked how to create an email newsletter. Email marketing has been and will continue to be one of the most essential pieces of a successful business. Email allows you to gain your followers' trust, showcase your expertise, and build long-term relationships with readers. 

While the concept of email marketing is the same as it's always been, how you approach it changes as new technologies come into play, and we learn more about what readers really want from those they choose to follow. 

You may be thinking email newsletters are old-school and no longer effective. But that's far from the truth. In fact, newsletter recipients often feel a closer connection with a business when they receive regular newsletters keeping them in the loop. 

Email newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with readers, and they can increase revenue for your business. They can be sent weekly, monthly, or spaced further out, depending on your business needs. Just make sure they are sent regularly, so your readers know when to expect them.

Here's how to create an email newsletter:

Before you can put together a newsletter, you need to know the goal for it. For example, you may want to use it to drive more traffic to a webpage or to educate customers or subscribers. Just remember, it's best to keep a single focus for each newsletter. So, if you have vendors, create a regularly scheduled newsletter strictly for them. Then create a second newsletter solely for your customers and so forth. 

Once you have a goal, you can choose what pieces you need to include in your newsletter to reach this goal, such as:

1. Promotions: Things that call people to take action with your business, such as to opt-in, register for an event, schedule a consultation, buy, send you a direct message, engage with you on social media, etc.
2. Inspiration: Helps to create a positive relationship with your audience. It might include things like quotes, success stories, and encouraging messages specific to your niche.
3. Education: Offers the opportunity for you to build your authority and instill trust in your customers. This might include tips, explainer images or videos, links to your site, or other things you have created. It could consist of industry news, resources, reviews, and more.
4. Community: Offers social proof and creates confidence in your potential customers. Things like customer testimonials, customer success stories, case studies, and stories from your own business & team are all great for building a feeling of community.
5. Entertainment: Gives your business some personality and builds likeability by making you more relatable and approachable. Things like memes, short funny stories, videos, and so forth can bring a smile to readers' faces and help them feel just a bit more understood.
6. Announcements: Information regarding upcoming events or product launches or updates. Job openings you might have. A digest of popular pieces from recent posts on your blog, social media accounts, etc.

There are a few ways you can use newsletters for your business:

• As an opt-in offer where subscribers receive daily, weekly, or monthly newsletters related to a specific topic.
• Add it as a bonus to a paid product or membership that offers additional tips, humor, or information related to the membership topic.
• Use it as an upsell offer to other products. They pay a nominal monthly, annual, or lifetime fee for regularly delivered information. This could be digitally delivered or created as a printed newsletter that is mailed out to them monthly.
• Make it a higher-priced paid newsletter subscription. With this option, you probably need to have an established reputation and offer some highly valuable information.

Once you start delivering newsletters regularly, you'll want to track the results. Three metrics to track include:

• Open rate: The number of people who open your emails. This helps you gauge how well your subject lines are doing. If you have high opens, they are working great. If not, you may want to work on writing shorter, more clear hooks to get people to open your messages.
• Click-through-rate: Once they open your message, how many click the links you included? The more clicks you have, the more interest there is in the topic or the more convincing you were in your message.
• Unsubscribe rate: If you see a high unsubscribe rate, it could be you are not providing the right content for your audience. You may need to segment your lists, send different types of information, etc. If you see spikes of unsubscribes after sending certain newsletters, you can better adjust things to meet reader needs.

Of course, you can track many other metrics, but these will give you an excellent start to learning how effective your newsletters are. Remember, to ensure you're getting the best results possible, your newsletter content needs to be:

• Relevant. Meaning it needs to relate to the reader's interests or topics they care about which they care
• Interesting enough to keep them subscribed. Make it entertaining & educational.
• The information you provide must be helpful.
• Eye-catching. Meaning your subjects must grab their attention and be enticing enough to get them to open your message.
• Visually appealing, both in content and design. Nobody likes boring information. Include visuals that relate to and enhance the information.
• Your newsletters need to be delivered on a schedule. Your messages, writing style, and so forth should all have a similar tone.

Once you deliver your newsletter, don't just set it aside. These archived messages can be used in several ways to give your business an additional boost.

• Make them available on your blog to drive traffic to your website.
• Achieve them in the member's area of your membership.
• Turn them into a paid membership of its own.
• Create an information product from related topics pulled from archives, such as a how-to guide or top 50 tips for doing something.
• Bundle them together to use as an upsell or down-sell.
• Convert the information into webinar content, articles, short reports, and more.

Birdsend is a robust email marketing program that can track many types of data points in your email marketing. They offer an easy-to-use interface with a focus on delivering the message, not making it graphics-heavy or pretty. Their autoresponder and tagging systems are thorough, and they are very quick to respond to any tech support needs. Paid plans only. 

Email marketing is not as hard as it seems. Using newsletters consistently is a great way to instill trust in readers, make connections with future joint venture partners, affiliates, and more. 

We are here to ensure you create email marketing outreach for your business, no matter what kind of company you run. Contact us today to learn more about our monthly newsletter services or to select your package now.