How to Make a Newsletter that Attracts Customers

It may seem a little outdated, but learning how to make a newsletter is a useful marketing tactic that can help you considerably expand your customer base. Not only that, but it can also help you reinforce your mission, build trust, and create customers for life. In fact, 31% of B2B marketers successfully utilized email newsletters to nurture leads and convert readers. By learning how to create, draft, and send a newsletter, you can provide valuable information about the benefits related to your brand’s offerings. Therefore, in this article, we’ll be going over the best practices to create a newsletter that attracts customers.

Why Should You Create a Newsletter?

According to research, email recipients open emails 40 times more often than social media participants respond to ads on Twitter or Facebook. While you may lose access to a social media audience over time, an email list is something you own forever. Therefore, you can keep the conversation going and engage with your email customers much more frequently. If you want to build a successful email list, you need to know how to create an effective newsletter. Good content drives leads and this source can become a gold mine if used properly.

Do Newsletters Work?

To answer the question, “Do newsletters work?” you have to define the purpose of a newsletter. A newsletter covers stories about the products and services of a company. It provides customers with updates about what business features and adds details about how customers can benefit from using a brand’s line. It may also provide information about topics related to a product or service’s use.

For example, if you sell SEO services, you may use a newsletter to tell customers about current changes in some of Google’s policies affecting SEO. Therefore, a newsletter provides newsworthy material that will motivate a customer to use what you market and sell.

Sending out newsletters can be easily integrated into an email marketing campaign, as it results in a higher level of customer interest. In fact, statistics reveal that newsletters work better than buying ads or communicating about products or services on social media platforms.

Newsletter metrics

To ensure that your own newsletter works, you need to consistently review the results from your newsletter marketing campaign. These results or metrics tell you how many customers:

• Open your newsletters
• Click on the links in your newsletters
• Unsubscribe

This information will serve you well, as it gives you insight into how people perceive your newsletters while revealing their level of interest. By reviewing these metrics, you can see where to make adjustments and what you can include in the newsletters for your email campaigns.

When you have access to the metrics and click-through rates for your email newsletters, you can continue to work on your newsletter and improve the messaging for your brand. To build trust in your brand and with your customers, you need to convey the right message and image. A newsletter helps you accomplish this while increasing your conversion rate optimization.

How to Make a Newsletter in 7 Steps

If you do not have experience in creating a newsletter, you can learn how to create one by following some basic steps. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Gather information about your target audience

To gather information about your target audience, you need to perform a target market analysis, which determines:

• What problems do my company’s products/services solve for my customers?
• Who buys my products and services? Base this information on location, gender, age, lifestyle, and budget.
• How does my company stand up to the competition?
• Does my business offer something better in terms of quality, value, or price?

You can gain this data from surveys and by engaging with your customers through blog comments, social media, and product or service feedback.

Step 2: Create a content plan and schedule

Once you have some basic information about your newsletter recipients, you can create a content plan and schedule. Write down some of the topics you want to cover. Keep in mind who will be reading the information. While you may enjoy writing about certain subjects, your content should be directed toward your customers’ interests and concerns.

Send out your newsletter weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, depending on the type of products or services you sell. For example, you may want to send it out more frequently if your content addresses trending subjects, such as relationships or health. If you provide real estate services or sell financial products, you may want to send out content once or twice a month. How often you send out your newsletter will depend on your customers’ interests and engagement.

Step 3: Select a platform for creating a newsletter

You can use newsletter tools to create a newsletter or select platforms that provide desktop publishing. Whatever platform you use needs to be user-friendly and provide responsive template designs. Once you have an idea about what you want to write, you can review and choose a template. Make sure you have enough space to add the content.

You don’t have to choose a flashy template. Minimal text and coloring will suffice. Select a design that your recipients can easily read and scan or click through the links. Make your newsletter mobile-friendly. Litmus, which collects data on email responses, shows most newsletter recipients read emails on their iPhones. Moreover, 30% more people open emails on a mobile device versus a desktop. Keep this in mind when you’re creating a design and adding content.

Step 4: Program all online forms to connect to your newsletter

Download and share data using online forms and surveys. By connecting these kinds of forms to your newsletter, you will increase engagement and learn more about your customers’ preferences. You can capture your readers’ attention with forms created for all device types, including mobile phones, tablets, and desktops. Some sites also handle hosting and form processing. In addition, the creation of forms and surveys can be customized to match your company’s brand and image.

Step 5: Create your content

Create content that helps your customer find a solution through your brand’s products and services. The content you create should answer your customers’ specific inquiries and concerns. Always ask, “Who can benefit from this content?” and, “How will it help them?”

The content you include in your newsletters can be a vital part of your brand storytelling strategy. This is a place where you can divulge more about the brand than you would normally with an average customer. Give insight into your founding story or expand your unique branding.

Step 6: Test optimization

From your analytics data, you can review who reads your email newsletters and do A/B or split testing to see which version gets the best response. That’s why email marketing works. It provides real-time statistics that can be used to improve a company’s influence in the marketplace. By using testing tools, you can also monitor email newsletter campaigns and develop a campaign checklist to test optimization and conversion rates.

Step 7: Review your newsletter’s performance

Once you test for optimization, you can find out more about engagement and click-through rates. From your email’s metric data, you can gather information on how customers engage with your newsletters and learn more about their reactions to the content. This will help you develop newsletter best practices.

Creating a Newsletter: Best Practices

To improve on newsletter performance and hold your readers’ continued interest, you need to follow best practices. These practices include establishing a clear goal, analyzing your readers’ wants, and altering your strategy through remarketing and retargeting until you get it right.

Go in with a clear goal

To make the most of newsletter and email marketing, set clear and transparent goals of what you want to accomplish. For example, you may want to increase customer interest in your brand’s products or services. To achieve this goal, you need to determine how to engage your customers. How will you use your newsletter to realize this objective?

Analyze your readers’ wants

Analyzing your customers’ preferences will make it easier to provide compelling content for your newsletter. By reviewing feedback and responses, you can feature details in your content that highlight your brand’s products and services, and hold your customers’ interest.

Alter your strategy until you get it right

Email marketing is a continual work-in-progress–analyzing and aligning your products and services so they meet your customers’ expectations. By altering your strategies from time to time, you can offer products and services that will continue to motivate your customers to buy and use what you have to sell and provide.