Email newsletters are designed to keep your audience up to speed on everything that is happening with your business. It’s an effective way to stay top of mind and stay in communication with your audience. By ensuring that the delivery of your newsletter is successful, it does take significant time and planning to craft the best one to share intentional messages.
Does your business need an Email Newsletter?
Hubspot has reported that there are 4 billion email users to date in 2022. This means that the moment you press the “send” button on your next email newsletter, someone will read it.
An email newsletter should be an essential part of your digital marketing strategy. You can share news tips and updates on your product, service, or nonprofit. Your audience will trust your brand if they feel connected to it. Making the investment to create and send an email newsletter is worth every penny. Establishing this trust and consistent communication will lead to increased membership growth, sales, and loyalty.
The real question is not whether you should create an email newsletter; it’s how you create an effective one. With so many creative tools out there, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. Building an email newsletter can be time consuming as well. This post is going to tell you everything you need to know in order to create the perfect email newsletter.
Step 1: Who is Your Audience? What Do They Want To Know?
Before you head to the drawing board of crafting the message on your next email newsletter. You will want a firm understanding of who your intended audience is. For example:
If you run a Nonprofit organization for domestic animals in Detroit Michigan, your audience will most likely be animal loving people, probably living in the Metropolitan Detroit Area. So the message in the newsletter should be relevant to the current topics and maybe animal-related events in your area.
I would recommend doing research on your audience. Researching your audience will help you craft the best message to share in your email outreach.
It’s important to be mindful of the message that you intend to share with your audience through the newsletter. Your goal should be to : Educate, Inspire, or Entertain your audience. The message you craft in your newsletter should emphasize that while also getting your message across.
Step 2: Choose an Email Newsletter Service
The first rule of creating a successful newsletter is : DO NOT try and send your newsletter manually through Gmail, Outlook, or any other public email service provider. Those tools have a limited capacity for the number of sends to external recipients every day. For example:
Google Workspaces limits senders to 500 external recipients per message and 3,000 per day.
For Office 365, there is a limit of 500 maximum recipients per message, and 5,000 per day.
If you have a large audience currently interested in your brand, business, or nonprofit, these solutions are not scalable.
These solutions also do not have creative and efficient functionalities for email templates, segmentation capabilities, or analytic tracking. There are other similar disadvantages with any app that is not specifically designed for email campaigns.
It is a recommendation to utilize an email newsletter service that has a drag and drop editor, with sign-up forms, and has the built-in collaboration capability. Its an added bonus to have your email newsletter tool synced to your CRM. Predictive Response, offers all of these features, plus automation, real-time analytics, and more for a competitive price.
Step 3: Make a Strategy and Set a Consistent Schedule
A major step in actually planning an email newsletter would be focusing on subject matters that are entertaining, insightful, and interesting to your intended audience. In Step 1, we discussed the importance of understanding who your audience is. Now, you need to decide the best method for sending your newsletter and how often you should send one.
The last thing you want to do is annoy your audience by sending a newsletter sequence too often or becoming forgotten by sending a newsletter infrequently. When it comes to the timing of your send, there is not a golden rule that would apply to everyone on your target list. Pay close attention to the demographics of where your audience may live. For example:
If your target audience primarily lives on the west coast, like California or Oregon. You will not receive the best ROI on your email newsletter if you schedule your send at 7am EST ( that would be 4am PST).
Predictive Response comes with data reporting capabilities to help you determine the best time to send emails to your customers. You can continue to build off your existing email marketing strategies and use activities you already know are successful.
I would recommend sending your Email Newsletters at the same time and/or day each week or each month, depending on the frequency of how they will be sent.
Step 4: Create Strong Content and an Eye-Catching Design
When was the last time you opened an email that was black and white with no external links, no images, no video, and very boring texts? Not that often.
This same concept applies to building the perfect Email newsletter. The copy, content, and design of the newsletter should be seamless to support your intended theme and reflect your brand’s identity.
If this is your first newsletter needs to set the tone as it should be the template for all future installments. Consider working with a Digital Marketing professional who specializes in Email Marketing and Design or consult with an expert to get a second opinion if needed. Creating your design should not be a complicated process. Using a Drag-and-drop method will make the creative process go smoothly . Be sure to check your links to ensure that they work.
To create efficiency in your design process, consider using an email template. Choose one that works for the type of content you want to share for your newsletter, and customize it. Predictive has partnered with Beepro to assist with resources for inspiration.
Note: The BeePro connector provides a vast amount of templates, at the moment we have a few at this time Here are some of the most used templates.
Another way to make the design process of creating a Newsletter more efficient is by having one resource to create the design and send the emails. The collaboration between Predictive and Beepro allows you to do both in one resource and also track and analyze the results directly in Salesforce.
Step 5 : Test, Analyze, and Optimize on a Daily Basis
Another important element in creating an email newsletter is to ensure that your email orks before you send it. Utilizing an A/B test and Litmus testing will help you improve your process and results.
Pre-testing your emails can help you spot errors, mistakes, and also ensure your links are working properly. This part of the email process should be automated as much as possible. Predictive has built in pre-send test capabilities to ensure your emails avoid spam. After you press the send button, wait for the results to come in. With the proper procedure in place to verify the results of the A/B and Litmus testing, your KPIs should align with the goal of your newsletters.
For more information on how you can elevate your email marketing results and improve your email deliverability in Salesforce, book a demo now with Predictive here.