Sending out an email newsletter is a great way to show your customers what you have to offer, to keep them engaged, and to entice them to buy more of your products. A newsletter is essential to any good email marketing program.
To make sure your newsletter is as effective as possible, you need to know the right steps to take in putting it together. How do you create a newsletter? Here’s how it should be done.
Choose a good publishing tool
If you want to publish a newsletter, the first thing you need to do is choose a newsletter publishing software tool. With a good newsletter program, you can keep your readers engaged, enhance your brand and bring in more leads.
Good newsletter software will help you to create compelling email newsletters, manage subscribers, and measure performance. It will enable you to not only design a newsletter, but also to test different versions of the publication to determine which performs better. You will be able to choose from different templates for the layout and to customize the template. And it will enable you to analyze various metrics.
In choosing your software, your decision should be based on your own needs and criteria such as price and the different features it contains.
There are many different newsletter tools on the market. They include HubSpot’s Email Marketing Tool, Moosend, Benchmark, SendInBlue, Mailjet, and many others.
HubSpot’s tool, for example, offers a drag-and-drop email editor, which enables you to create a professional looking newsletter that you can customize to fit your brand without needing a designer or IT person. This software enables you to see who is reading your newsletter and when, as well as the most popular links and documents for readers.
Another newsletter tool, Moosend, helps you put together personalized newsletters with interactive features such as videos and images. It also gives you many different ready-made templates from its library to choose from. The tool also offers landing pages and subscription forms to help you generate more leads. And it contains detailed reporting and analytics features.
Determine your goals
The next step is establishing your goals for the newsletter. What is the purpose of the publication, what would you like to achieve by publishing it? You need to determine how the newsletter fits into your overall content strategy.
For example, do you want the newsletter to bring more readers to your blog, generate more leads, get more email contacts, increase your website readership, or promote new products and services? Once you figure out your overall goal, all of your content will be determined by it.
You should also establish some key performance indicators for the goals you have set, some metrics to evaluate how successful it is.
Template and content
After you’ve established your goals, you’re ready to pick a template and put together your content. If you don’t have much experience with newsletters, pre-made templates are probably the best way to go, and the newsletter tools offer these kinds of templates.
Then you can go out and search for content that will help you meet your goals.
Customizing
Using a template is a great launching pad for your newsletter. But after you’ve chosen a generic template, you want to customize it to your needs, which the tools enable you to do easily. The template will give you some idea of what your newsletter will look like before writing the content. This way, you will know exactly how much space you have for your content.
There’s no need to add a lot of bells and whistles for the template. Newsletters that have a simple color and text formatting also have a good look. The key is having your design make it easy for people to read, scan, and click features of the email.
Adding the content
Then you want to set your email newsletter size and add your content. The words and pictures obviously are the most important items in the newsletter, so you want to take the time you need to make sure you get it right. Many newsletters keep their copy simple and direct to encourage readers to click through. You can also add images if they will help to support the copy. Make sure to do a good job editing your newsletter as well.
MagHub
We would love to show you how MagHub can handle all aspects of your publishing enterprise, everything from subscriptions, flatplanning, billing, freelancing, projects, and marketing – all from within one system. Contact us to learn more or to set up a real-time demonstration.