Would you like to learn how to create a newsletter? We prepared this article with tips that are going to be presented in a logical order, so you can better understand what you are supposed to do each step of the way. By the end of this text, you will be able to create your own newsletters by yourself.

Before we get going, what is a newsletter? Do you know the reasons why this marketing strategy is so important? 

Understanding why create a newsletter is so fundamental, in regards to brand positioning, is also helpful to better define the approach and nature of your content.

We are going to show how your brand can explore newsletters as a way to inform and educate your target audience while your company becomes a reference in the market in which it belongs.

This checklist will certainly not only help you on how to create a newsletter, but it will make you become a better email sender overall. Enjoy the reading!

Take care of your database

Your database is the list of people who are going to receive your pieces of communication. Make sure that the emails are being sent to active users, that is, holders of a valid email address.

It is necessary to say that because many companies are reckless when it comes down to building a healthy email list. 

If you don’t pay attention to how you are collecting people’s information, including email accounts, you will end up with too many invalid email addresses in your lists.

This means you will be talking to nobody, seeing your email bounce occurrences grow, having poor engagement levels, and, in some cases, having your account blocked.

There is no point in learning how to create a newsletter if the quality of your email lists is unsatisfactory.

You can take care of your database by:

• collecting email addresses organically;
• asking for informed consent before sending any commercial messages;
• attracting people who match your line of business;
• checking an email validity in registration forms, even before it gets to your database;
• never consider buying an email list. 

These simple actions are essential to ensure your database is made of valid emails, which can give you the expected return during email marketing campaigns.

Be legally compliant

Sending emails to everybody is counterproductive, not to mention illegal. Email senders must be aware of the legislation that regulates their activity. When the law is not respected, companies can get fined or even get their activity suspended.

The GDPR, the legislation in Europe, and the LGPD, in Brazil, established some requirements for email senders, which need to be strictly followed.

Both legislations require that email senders can only send newsletters and other kinds of commercial emails if the users have given their informed and free consent. 

They also require that companies must be responsible for the data held in their power, in the sense of privacy, security, and integrity of these pieces of information.

Getting users’ consent, as well as keeping users’ sensitive information safe and sound, must be a priority for companies.

After your email practices are legally compliant, you can start studying techniques on how to create a newsletter. Legally speaking, it’s the only way to do so without taking any unnecessary risks.

Validate your email list

We have covered the importance of having responsive and engaged email lists and the importance of being legally compliant. These aspects are important to be recognized as a legitimate and responsible email sender.

Our third point is linked to the necessity of checking the validity of an email address. Understanding why it is recommended to validate an email address is not rocket science.

Imagine you are learning how to create a newsletter, putting a lot of time, effort, and investments into it, but at the end of the day, the people who are going to receive these emails don’t even exist in real life.

If your email lists are full of invalid addresses, it’s harder to reach your target audience. You can’t even know which audience you are reaching.

When you check the validity of email lists, you can be sure only real people are receiving your messages. This way, you can have a clearer picture of how subscribers are reacting to them. 

Thus, you are able to adapt email marketing campaigns according to the responses you are getting. This means you can gradually improve your email practices, getting more conversions and sales.

Clean email lists provide the conditions you need to have a healthy email reputation and good email deliverability. It’s everything you could wish for, in order to create a newsletter that will eventually find interested readers.

Choose the right tool to send your newsletter

Professional email senders usually need a tool to send newsletters, because it requires an adequate infrastructure to send emails in a high volume.

Sending emails manually is going to consume most of your valuable time, which you could spend on learning how to create a newsletter. 

It’s also worthy to mention that manual sendings are ineffective, due to unnecessary bounces and triggers to spam filters. We should also warn you that this practice looks quite unprofessional.

Using the right tools can bring many benefits to your email campaigns. Recording the email performance and turning it into email marketing metrics and KPIs is one of them.

Automating your sending process is an important step to take toward a better sender reputation. 

It will also give you the comfort and time you need to deliver a good performance in your campaigns, including importing your email lists, having access to newsletter templates, and creating the HTML codes to design your content.

Besides all of those benefits, using tools to send emails will make you have the deserved spare time. You won’t lose your time (and mind) because of manual sendings anymore.

Define your newsletter goal

Here’s an important lesson on how to create a newsletter: even before writing a single word, establish the purpose of these emails.

What are your intentions with these newsletters? Informing users? Educating them about a product or service? Tell your brand’s history and achievements? Are the articles written to new leads or old customers? Are you trying to drive traffic to your site or landing pages?

Make sure your intentions are crystal clear. If your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, all of the content and design of the newsletter must be aligned with this objective.

When you have specific goals, it’s easier for you to create an email marketing campaign, and follow-up messages too.

Marketing metrics and KPIs are going to answer you if your goal was achieved. If you create a newsletter campaign, whose purpose is to increase engagement levels, you must look at all the metrics that show how close (or distant) you are to your goal.

Having a plain and direct goal is something that should be one of the top priorities when you want to create a newsletter.

Use landing pages

When you want to advertise a specific product or service, you shouldn’t attract people to visit your homepage. There’s a lot of information on your website, which can lead the new visitors to confusion.

They will probably visit your page, but they won’t take the desired action. Instead of directing them to your official pages, try using landing pages.

As they are specific, simple, and straightforward, landing pages can capture the user’s attention to the action you need to be taken.

Do you need more people to subscribe to your channels, and sign- up for your newsletters? Use landing pages to capture new emails.

Everything you need at this point is their email and consent, and landing pages are great to extract these pieces of data for you. Of course, you can try finding out more about these new visitors, but don’t be too curious, nor make landing pages that are too long.

By keeping the filling-out process uncomplicated and effortless, you might capture more and more emails.

Design the sign-up form

The newsletter sign-up forms are frequently elaborated with the main goal of collecting new email addresses. So, they had better be attractive and compelling to new subscribers, encouraging them to finish their registration to your channels. 

Furthermore, take this opportunity to get permission to send emails from these new subscribers. This way, you will become compliant with the legislation that regulates the activity of email senders.

Simplicity is the word of order when you are elaborating and designing the sign-up registration forms. So, ask only the information you need, including just a few questions to make the list segmentation possible.

In this sense, think about collecting some data that might be used when you want to create a newsletter, according to the kind of content users want to access. Email list management is the special ingredient to make your email campaigns successful.

Another thing to be done in sign-up forms is to let new subscribers choose the frequency and nature of the messages they are about to receive from you. Subscribers must have all the control over their preferences.

Moreover, you must be very clear about how your subscribers can benefit from receiving your newsletters.

Also, implementing an email validation service, such as the email checker by SafetyMails, in sign-up forms is necessary to avoid losing new leads due to typos or invalid addresses. 

These APIs can easily and accurately verify the email addresses in real-time, as well as solicit changes in case of any inconsistency. This way, you will make the most of your sign-up forms.

Customize the newsletter template

Using a newsletter template can save a lot of your time. There are many templates available online. In addition, some platforms for email sending provide a huge variety of pre-made templates.

Templates are extremely helpful if you aren’t familiar with designs and layouts. However, pre-made models are only the starting point. 

The newsletters must be a reflection of your brand, which means you have to adapt the template according to your brand’s color, font, copy, and design. It’s also important to pay attention to the design of the template you are going to use to create a newsletter. It must be:

• scannable;
• readable;
• highlighting keywords;
• CTAs buttons;
• links.

Thinking about the user experience, make sure the template is functional both on desktops and mobile devices. Many people open their mailboxes on their smartphones, so the newsletter design has to be mobile-friendly.

To conclude, templates are a great option to speed up the creation process. Just make sure the features of your brand are seen, perceived, and recognized when people open your newsletters.

Attention to the subject line

Create a subject line that is appealing to subscribers, making them open the newsletter as soon as they read it. However, it’s easier said than done. Many marketers struggle when they are elaborating on a subject line.

Activating the curiosity of potential readers is a big challenge. As subject lines are tricky, you can use the following suggestions that might be helpful to you:

• be brief and specific;
• introduce the topic of the newsletter in the subject line, and stick to it in the body of the email;
• avoid spammy words at all costs, especially in subject lines;
• your subject line has to grab the reader’s attention at the first reading;
• use A/B tests to experiment with different subject lines, validating the hypothesis of what resonates better with your audience.

Crafting the perfect subject line is a very difficult task indeed. You won’t get it right from the start, that’s for sure. However, A/B tests and experience will improve the quality of the subject lines over time.

Create your content

What content can people find when they open your newsletters? There are many newsletter ideas to be explored, such as:

• case studies;
• educational and informative articles;
• tutorials;
• guides;
• tips;
• fun facts;
• exclusive material;
• and much more.

As long as your copy is interesting and engaging to subscribers, you can explore and experiment with different types of email.

As we are discussing content, always keep in mind to use a language that is easy to understand, prefer short texts, use lists and topics to explain ideas, and balance the ratio between images and written parts.

In addition, use a conversational tone and explore storytelling techniques. This way, readers won’t feel overwhelmed or tired when they open your newsletters. 

Focus on the reader, and create a newsletter that is enjoyable. Make subscribers feel excited and eager to open your content because they know they will be entertained or informed, depending on the occasion, of course.

Personalize your messages

Personalizing your newsletters is all about making the users have the feeling that the emails were elaborated specially for them.

To make them feel this way, you must address their wants and needs directly. That’s why you have a target audience. You have to know what your customers are looking for to solve their problems or what they like.

Besides approaching their problems or tastes, you can use some personalization tags in the body of the email too. 

For example, calling subscribers by their names when you greet them at the beginning of the message is recommended to add personalization to your emails. 

You can also talk about their home countries, occupations, and customer behaviors to make the emails relevant to the audience that is receiving them. Focus on personalization and your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) will increase.

Start your newsletter campaign

After deciding the purpose of the newsletters, the frequency, the subject lines, the content, the design, the CTAs, and everything else, you are finally ready to send your newsletters to subscribers.

Learning how to create a newsletter is a complex topic, which involves many steps. Moreover, the work is never done. There’s always something to improve or adapt, depending on the user’s response.

Starting your newsletter campaign is quite rewarding. When the emails are finally sent, you can analyze how the subscribers reacted to the content you have created with a lot of studies, research, work, and effort.

In fact, the launching of an email campaign is only the beginning of the next stage of this cycle: analyzing, testing, and measuring results. 

Analyze, test and measure

It’s recommendable to start the analysis just after the email marketing campaign was launched. If you need to make any urgent modification, in order to fix issues or make adaptations, for example, you still have the opportunity to do so. This is also the case if you were running any A/B tests.

When the campaign is already over, your team should start gathering data to analyze and measure the accomplishments that were achieved during the campaign.

Don’t forget to celebrate what was achieved during the campaign, but pay attention to the aspects that weren’t so engaging. Try understanding the ups and downs of the campaign under analysis.

In this sense, consider all the most revealing Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs to measure the deliverability and engagement of the campaign.

Tracking these numbers is fundamental if you want to be in constant improvement. Metrics and KPIs are going to provide the data you need to make more informed decisions, as well as show how receptive your audience is in relation to your emails.

Analyzing, testing, reviewing, adapting. It’s a cycle that makes your newsletter campaigns get better and better over time.

Learn more about running a successful email marketing campaign

Are newsletters still relevant?

Yes, newsletters are still relevant. They are an excellent tool to communicate with your audience, informing and educating them about your company and area of work.

Newsletters can strengthen the relationship you have with your customers through personalized content, which is carefully created by your marketing team, with the main goal of offering a positive experience to readers. By the way, newsletters have never been so relevant, as they are today.

Moreover, newsletters are relevant to building brand awareness, generating more leads, and tracking the level of interest of subscribers in your company.