Email newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your audience. But getting started can be a bit daunting. From choosing the right platform, to building an email list, to designing and laying out your newsletter, there are a number of things to consider before sending out your first email campaign. newsletter.

Scheduling an email newsletter

It is important to understand what the objectives of your newsletter are.

• Generate more leads/sales
• Position yourself as a thought leader in your industry
• Provide updates on your products and services
• Offer premium content to subscribers as a source of income

Keep in mind that email marketing should fit into a larger content strategy. While unique content may be restricted to your subscribers only, the messaging should be consistent across all channels.

Once you have decided what you want to get from your newsletters and have planned the content and programming, you can take two very important steps: selecting a platform and growing your audience.

Choose the right platform to send an email newsletter

There are a large number of email marketing platforms and tools available. Most of the better known providers will offer a free version up to a certain number of subscribers and increase the cost as your audience grows.

Some platforms, like mailchimp, a great choice for those just starting out, as it offers additional built-in features that can help grow and nurture an audience, such as ready-to-use templates, signup forms, landing pages, and social posts from one place. . However, if your goal is to generate revenue by providing exclusive content to subscribers, Sub-stack and Review are two popular choices.

It’s worth researching email marketing platforms and tools to make sure it has all the features you need now, and also in the future. This can include integration with other applications and platforms, automation, multivariate testing, and advanced segmentation.

Grow an Email Marketing Audience

Getting people to sign up to receive your newsletter can be difficult. Don’t expect to add a “subscribe now” form to your website and expect signups to roll in.

This is where treating email newsletters as part of a larger content strategy comes into play. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes – what would drive them to give you their data ?

• Protected Content, Tools, and Offerings – guides, reports, white papers, e-books, and articles that require submission of contact information before they can be read, tools that provide access to additional features upon login, or passwords discount which will only be provided after joining the list
• Exclusivity – be in the know first, access new products and services before everyone else, discounts only available to subscribers
• Stay in the loop – invitation to subscribe at the end of blog posts and articles to receive similar content straight to their inbox
• To attend an event – ​​in person and online
• To win something or get results – provide details to be eligible to enter a sweepstakes, giveaway or contest, or receive results after completing a quiz

If you’re still unsure which format will help entice users to sign up, you’ll find some great content ideas that can help increase subscribers. here.

Be sure to include a clear call to action throughout your website to encourage users to subscribe, keep signup forms short and simple, and promote content and offers via social media . You might also consider using pop-ups (although many users find these intrusive and annoying).

If you have great content to promote, but your audience is small, consider working with a partner with a large database that can drive traffic to your website. The other option is to buy email lists from data houses, but since the quality is usually poor (and those contacts never indicated they wanted to hear from you), organic growth from a select audience will always be a better option in the long run.

Creation and design of an e-mail newsletter

Many platforms will provide a number of pre-made templates and a drag and drop email builder. Both can be customized, saving time and money, as long as you don’t mind using the default fonts and layouts.

If you assign a designer to create HTML email templates for you, keep in mind that some of these templates may not look the same in different email clients or on different devices. It’s essential that templates, whether pre-made or custom, are thoroughly tested before being sent out to your audience. Elements and fonts that display incorrectly can damage credibility and, if particularly poorly designed, may not even pass spam filters.

If you use Google Analytics to see how users interact with your content once they land on your site through a newsletter, it’s also a good idea to track every link in the email so you can easily filter that out. traffic for reports. Some platforms will integrate with Google Analytics and therefore do this automatically, but others will require the links to be tagged manually using a tool like Campaign URL Builder.

Once you’ve finished designing the template and are happy with how it looks, the next challenge is to get people to open your newsletter. Much of this relies on write a good topic to capture their attention. You can also opt for A/B testing subject lines to see what works best, and for those who don’t open the email, all may not be lost, as you can resend to non-openers with a different subject line.

After launching an email newsletter

If you’ve invested time and effort into creating an email newsletter, don’t waste it by leaving too much time between sends. Mailing lists can quickly stagnate, and with so many emails arriving in a user’s inbox every day, if they don’t hear from you for a while, they may forget who you are. are and why he signed up in the first place!

Regularly review the performance of past campaigns to assess what worked best. Which links were clicked? Which subject lines got the highest open rates?

Having a standard naming convention that allows you to group each type of email campaign (promotion, newsletter, webinar, blog post roundup, etc.) can help make it easier to analysis of this data, as different campaigns will have different objectives.

As the audience grows, experiment with segmentation to deliver more personalized content to subscribers based on what they previously engaged with.

And finally, don’t be afraid to experiment. Whether it’s adding an emoji to a subject line or completely redesigning a template, taking a chance once in a while can be a good thing. And if you’re nervous about trying something new, A/B testing offers a great way to try it out on a small portion of an audience first.