How to Create Effective Email Newsletter That People Will Like to Read

What Is a Newsletter?

It's a short and informative letter with an eye-catchy design that businesses send to their clients. For companies, that's a great way of promoting their goods or services, driving traffic to their websites and increasing their sales. For consumers, it's a chance to save money, be among the first to buy new products and learn helpful news.

How to Get Started with Writing a Newsletter?

No matter which industry your business belongs to, you should remember these four basic tips for writing newsletters:

• Be concise

• Send out your newsletters to your customers regularly

• Write such newsletters that you would be interested to read yourself

• Fix your open rates

It would be great if you could also measure other parameters, apart from the open rates — but we'll talk about this later.

Entrepreneurs who have never written newsletters before, often don't know what to start with. To prevent you from feeling confused, we'd like to share this simple 5-step guide with you:

1. Decide what exactly you'd like to tell your recipients
2. Write a draft, imagining that it's a letter that you're planning to send to one person only
3. Review the draft
4. Send the draft to about 10% to 15% of your subscribers
5. Check the open rate, get feedback from some of your customers, make sure everything is all right and send the newsletter to the rest of the clients

You can include your own email in the database to see how your newsletter looks in your inbox.

What Are Email Newsletter Best Practices?

The most important elements of a newsletter are:

• Headers

• Logos

• Images

• Content layout

• Personalized content

Your email newsletter should provide immediate value to its recipients. Its content should be highly relevant to your audience. Instead of speaking only about your company and products, you should deliver useful information to your readers — for instance, share the latest industry trends, step-by-step guides or insights on a specific topic.

How to Make the Most of B2B Email Newsletters?

All the information from the previous passages is relevant both for B2B and B2C newsletters. The former differ from the latter in one meaningful aspect: after reading the text, one person might make the purchasing decision on behalf of the organization that they represent. Of course, you shouldn't expect the majority of recipients to buy your products — but motivating people for the purchase is the ultimate aim of newsletters.

93% of B2B marketers use emails to communicate with their audiences. B2B customers are more interested in long-term solutions, which results in a longer sales cycle, longer relationships and longer contracts with organizations. During the sales cycle, you shouldn't only keep urging the recipients to transfer money to you. You should also do the following:

• Increase awareness

• Create a sense of stability and commitment

• Provide basic information for a project

Please mind that even your most loyal customers might fail to read your email newsletter attentively from the first to the last line. Most likely, they will focus only on those parts that seem the most informative to them. When talking to a B2B client during the sales cycle, you shouldn't expect them to remember all the facts from your emails.

Does Your Business Really Need a Newsletter?

Before you begin to work on your first newsletter, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Do other businesses from your industry use this communication format?

• How often do they send newsletters to their customers and which information do they include there?

• How much time, funds and other resources do they invest in creating their newsletters?

If you realize that you can afford to try this marketing method and your audience will be likely to perceive it positively, you can start composing your first email newsletter, relying on the step-by-step guide that we'll share now.

Step-by-Step Guide on Creating a Top-Notch Email Newsletter

This is a generic guide. It should suit organizations from all industries, regardless of the fact whether they cater to the B2B or the B2C segment.

Determine Which Type of Newsletter You'd Like to Send

All the newsletters that you send out should stick to one specific theme. Let's imagine that your company produces and sells frozen meals. If you target your newsletters to the B2C segment, you can inform your recipients about healthy nutrition plans, losing weight and staying fit thanks to your products. If you cater to the B2B segment, you can tell the readers about the technologies that you use, your logistics, marketing or other aspects of running your business. It would be great if you could synchronize the content of some of your emails with industry news, trends and events. For instance, if scientists have discovered new properties of a specific ingredient, you can tell your recipients about your meals that contain this ingredient.

The biggest mistake that you can potentially make is to focus exclusively on self-promotion. Instead, you should keep only 10% of your content promotional and 90% educational. Cluttered and unfocused newsletters will fail to help you boost client engagement.

Select an Appealing Topic

When deciding on the topic of your newsletter, you might want to stick to these recommendations:

• Keep it short and simple

• Avoid overexperimenting

• Avoid spammy titles

• Let the topics expose the main content of your newsletter

• Test a few newsletter topics to detect the one with the highest conversion rates

An ideal topic should convince the recipient that you can fix their pain points in one click. For instance: "7 Nutritious Dinners for a Child Who Has Just Begun to Go to School".

Write Compelling Email Subject Lines

Here are some smart tips on creating a perfect email subject line:

• Begin with a verb

• Keep the characters under 50 and words under 10

• Avoid going ALL CAPS and spammy words

• Avoid too many punctuations

• Use your sense of humor

• Don't promote in your subject line

If you compare newsletters by various companies from your industry, you'll see that many of them have identical subject lines. That's bad for two reasons:

• They miss their chance to make themselves stand out from the rest

• People will be less likely to open their newsletters

To better engage with your clients, you should get creative. Plus, you can inform the recipients about the immediate incentive that they will get after opening your email. You can even play on your customers' FOMO to motivate them to act quickly.

Keep Design Minimal

Here are a few tips on creating a visually pleasing email newsletter:

• Optimize your content with necessary white space, avoid overcrowding

• Use appropriate shades that keep readers focused on the content

• Add royalty-free images but not copyrighted photos

• Draft your newsletters in readable professional fonts

• Keep your color scheme similar to your business logo

• Make subheadings to break monotonous content

Your newsletter doesn't necessarily need to contain images of GIFs. Many businesses successfully boost their conversions thanks to emails that feature only text. Your recipients' attention should be focused on the informative content of your newsletter and not its design. The primary goal of the email design is to help people to quickly find the right link and click it.

Make Sure Images Have Alt Text

Some recipients might disable images in their emails. If the images that you include in your newsletter lack the alt text, users will see only blank spaces. If you use alt text, people will understand the meaning and message of the visual elements. It's especially important if you use images as CTAs.

Design a Distinct Template

Once you create a visually appealing template for your newsletter, you'll be able to reuse it over and over. That should save you a lot of time and effort. The readers will get used to your trademark style and it will be easier for them to perceive your information.

The best templates are those that support drag-and-drop functionality. You should be able to drag a video, image or any other design element to the right place and drop it there. You shouldn't experiment too much with your newsletter's design. Instead, you should keep it simple to enable the recipients to interpret the message.

Personalize Your Emails

The newsletters that you send to different recipients shouldn't be 100% identical to each other. The more you personalize them, the more efficiently you'll strengthen your engagement with consumers. You can start by adding the recipient's name to the newsletter's subject line. In the body of your email, you can share some statistics about the recipient: for instance, "The last time you purchased something in our online store was ..." or "Over the past six months, you spent such and such sum of money in our online store".

Keep Your Content Concise and Snappy

The optimal length of a newsletter is between 200 to 500 words. You should write like you talk and keep it casual. The text should contain as many facts as possible. To structure it, you can use subheadings and bullet points. You shouldn't include too many links in the text: once a person clicks a link, they might forget about your newsletter and never come back to it. Besides, too many links might prevent your CTAs from standing out.

It would be better if you send your emails from a personal address and not your company's. The recipients should perceive your newsletters as messages from their friends.

You shouldn't look and sound too corporate. Once you establish a tone for your newsletters, you should stick to it. That will be your brand voice. You should use the same intonations as on your site and on social networks. Please avoid using any kind of jargon, be it your office slang or industry lingo. No need to say, there shouldn't be any misprints, grammar or punctuation mistakes in your newsletter.

Add a Call-to-Action

As we've already said, the ultimate goal of sending out email newsletters is to boost your conversions. Feel free to use CTAs to motivate your readers for the following types of actions:

• Buy your goods or services

• Take part in surveys

• Subscribe to you on social media

• Share your newsletter on social media

• Pre-register for a product

People will be more eager to follow your CTAs if you design them as buttons and not links. These buttons should be clearly visible and feature approachable action verbs. They should create a sense of urgency and communicate with readers directly, using the first-person pronoun. An ideal CTA is short and has directional cues.

Your newsletter should contain only one call-to-action. If there are more, people will be less likely to follow them.

You can also add social media buttons that people will be able to push to share your newsletter on various platforms. But you should realize that very few recipients will use this opportunity.

Send Out Your Newsletter Regularly

It makes sense to launch a newsletter only if you're planning to be consistent with it. You need to send out your newsletter regularly for the following reasons:

• It's the most efficient way of boosting your customer loyalty

• You'll keep people interested in your information

• You'll prove to the recipients that you take your newsletter seriously

All media publish new content on a fixed schedule. People are used to the thought that meaningful news can't be shared randomly.

Let Your Recipients Unsubscribe from You

If a person unsubscribes from your newsletter, it doesn't mean they will never buy your products. Maybe, they just don't like this format of communication. All of your newsletters should feature an Unsubscribe button. You can place it either at the top or at the bottom of your email and it should be very easy to find. Once a user clicks it, the system should confirm that they have successfully unsubscribed from your emails. Plus, it should tell them that whenever they would like to subscribe to you once again, they will be able to do so at any moment.

Some entrepreneurs dislike the idea of adding the Unsubscribe button to their newsletters. They think they might lose clients and their sales might drop. In fact, customers will appreciate that you take care of them. They won't bombard you with emails asking you to unsubscribe them because they can't do it themselves.

If too many recipients unsubscribe from your email newsletter, it means you should revise your marketing strategy. You should send your emails only to those people who will open and read them. Otherwise, your newsletters will end up in the Spam folder and it will be harder for you to reach your audience.

Set Expectations on Your Subscribe Page

When users open your website, they should clearly see where they can subscribe to your newsletter. On the Subscribe page, you should inform people about the frequency and topic of your newsletter. You can also mention that they will be able to get access to discounts and promotions if they subscribe.

Measure the Metrics

Here are a few examples of metrics that you can focus on:

• Bounce rate

• Delivery rate

• Spam complaint rate

• List growth rate

• Open rate

• Click-through rate

• Sharing rate

• Revenue per email

• Conversion rate

• Unsubscribe rate

The term "bounce rate" denotes the percentage of emails that weren't delivered successfully. If the recipient's address is closed or invalid, that would be a hard bounce. If their inbox is full or is facing a server issue, that would be a soft bounce. The higher your bounce rate, the more likely your recipients' mailboxes will be to classify your newsletter as spam. If your spam complaint rate reaches 1%, it's time to review your email marketing strategy.

On average, an email list expires by 25% per year because people change their jobs or leave their old emails. Your list growth rate should be 25% or higher to compensate for the losses.

The open rate is the most dubious metric. It might vary significantly depending on the tools and methods you use. Many tools classify an email as opened only if it contains images. If the email contains images but the recipients' mailing service blocks them, the tool will determine that the newsletter was not opened. The average open rate for newsletters is 20%. If you're not too happy with your current open rate, you should try to optimize your subject lines and provide excellent benefits to your customers in each email.

The click-through rate is probably the most important metric. It reveals the overall health of your newsletter concept. It shows how many people followed the links from your email (which means they might be eager to buy your goods or services).

The revenue per email rate is relevant only for companies with very short sales cycles. You shouldn't rely on it if your customers need months to make a purchasing decision.

A typical email conversion rate is around 2.89%. That's much more than other marketing methods could grant you. To boost your conversion rates, you should insert links to your landing page into all of your emails. The landing page should look visually appealing and have an intuitive layout. It would be wise to conduct A/B testing of various versions of the landing page before it goes live.

You should strive to keep your unsubscribe rate less than 1%. If it's higher, you should check whether your emails nicely adapt to mobile displays of all sizes. If they don't, the recipients won't bother to read them. The two other popular reasons for unsubscribing are lack of value and substandard design.

The metrics will let you detect the optimal frequency of sending out newsletters. Your customers should receive your emails at least once per month. The most common frequency is once per week.

To determine the best time for sending your newsletters, you should analyze the click-through rate. Without this metric, it's impossible to predict whether people would prefer to receive your newsletters in the morning, in the evening or at mid-day.

The Best Software for Creating and Sending Email Newsletters

One of the best-known brands in this segment is Bitrix24. It's a powerful CRM system that has built-in marketing software. In the CRM, you can keep detailed information about each of your customers and find out at which stage of the sales funnel they currently are. The database can store an unlimited amount of data and you can customize it. You'll be able to import and export data from and to Excel.

Bitrix24 has a built-in contact center and excellent tools for email marketing. Plus, it supports integrations with Mailchimp, Sendpulse and Mailigen.

You can start with creating any number of static or dynamic customer segments. For each segment, you can design a unique email campaign. You'll appreciate the automation opportunities of the system, such as trigger-based emails.

Some customers would never open your emails, even if you write the most attractive and personalized subject lines for them. Bitrix24 allows you to reach these individuals on social platforms. You can use your email marketing lists to find your customers on Facebook, Instagram or Google. Through the CRM, you can send out SMS as well as messages in Telegram, Viber, FB Messengers and other apps. Besides, you'll be able to benefit from telemarketing.

You'll discover email marketing templates, a landing page and a capture form builder in Bitrix24. Through the marketing module of this software, you'll be able to design offers and track statistics. To find out how it all works and how to use the product's functionality, you can check the comprehensive tutorials of Bitrix24. They're available both in text and video formats.

To make sure Bitrix24 is the right fit for you, you can test its free version. It accommodates an unlimited number of users and offers 5 GB of free online storage. You'll be able to store and edit your product catalog in the system as well as modify user access rights for your staff members.

Bitrix24 is available in a cloud format and as an on-premise solution. You can get access to its API and source code. Its free mobile app is compatible with iOS and Android devices. The cheapest plan costs $39 per month and accommodates 5 users. The priciest plan costs $159 per month and accommodates an unlimited number of users.

Benefits of Sending Out Email Newsletters

If you follow the recommendations from this article, your newsletter should help you to achieve the following goals:

• Better engage with consumers. People love to stay in touch with the brands that they like. The more regularly you interact with them, the more they will trust you and the more likely they will be to click your CTAs.

• Boost your sales. According to statistics, your customers should be ready to spend around 140% more on purchases marketed through your newsletters than people who don't receive newsletters. To encourage them to buy quickly, you can offer them discounts that remain valid only for a few days.

• Increase your brand value. When you share knowledge with people, they will start perceiving you as an expert in your industry. Whenever they need a consultation, they will be likely to reach out to you. They will trust you and recommend you to their acquaintances.

• Drive more traffic to your website. With the help of CTAs, you can motivate consumers to read your blog, check your products or benefit from promotional offers. Emails are one of the cheapest and the most efficient ways of encouraging people to visit your website. Besides, you can also include social media buttons in your emails.

• Cut down expenses of your marketing strategy. With the help of email marketing, you can earn $44 for each $1 you spend. It's an ideal technique for small businesses with limited budgets.

Creating and sending newsletters is not a difficult task. First, you might prefer to do it yourself. Over time, you might want to delegate it to an assistant. It should be easy for you to find a person who will cope well with this duty.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you better understand how to create an email newsletter. You should send out your emails regularly and stick to a selected theme. It's vital to keep your subject lines catchy, your design minimal and the bodies of your emails highly informative. The optimal duration of your newsletter should be between 200 and 500 symbols. To facilitate the process of composing and sending out emails, you can rely on dedicated software, such as Bitrix24.