The 7 Step Checklist for Creating an Email Newsletter

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Having an email newsletter is essential in today’s world. Instead of constantly worrying about getting new traffic, you can build a relationship with the people that have already come to your site. Without a capture form and use of the best email marketing services to help you achieve this, it is near impossible to be successful at email marketing. In this article, we will go through a 7 step checklist that will allow you to create an amazing email newsletter.

1. Defining Your Newsletter’s Goal

Depending on how long you have been in business and how far you have gotten with your marketing strategy, you may or may not already have a content marketing strategy in place. If you do, you need to figure out how your newsletter is going to fit into your strategy that you already have in place.

Do you want to gain awareness? Further segment your list? Make sales on the spot?

Knowing the goal of your newsletter will allow you to make all of your other decisions much easier. If you don’t set a goal and you start sending our emails, it will feel disjointed and confusing to your list. You have to have a strategy to be effective with your email marketing methods.

2. Gathering Your Content

If you are stressing over content, don’t worry. You have plenty of content to share with your readers. Just remember that you need to be sending content that they want to read. While you are trying to achieve your own goals, you won’t achieve anything if you don’t help your current and future customers. Business is all about serving your market so make sure you are paying attention to what your customers want to hear about and you will find it easier to create content.

Some of the common places to look for great content to share are:

        Your blog

        Industry news

        Internal memos

        Company research

Anything informative to your reader is usually your best bet. Try out different topics and styles to see what your audience responds to.

3. Designing Your Template

If you see the word “designing” and start to have a mild heart attack, calm down. Most email services you use are going to have templates that you can choose from and customize. Before you start clicking away and trying out templates, you need to figure out the parts that you want to have in your email newsletter.

Is it mainly going to be text? Are you adding images? 1 or 2? Knowing exactly what you are going to put in the newsletter will allow the process to flow. Once you have your template together, you will be able to fill it with your content. Make sure that you leave enough space for your text. You don’t want to find yourself downsizing your text to miniature size just to get it to fit into your template.

4. Adding the Personal Touch

When we get emails that say, “Hi, Bob”, we know that the autoresponder doesn’t really know our names, but we like that it has our name anyway, don’t we? Email personalization makes us want to open it more than if we were getting an email that was to “reader”.

You can add personalization through settings in your autoresponder that will allow you to put their name and other related fields as you see fit. While it is nice to personalize, don’t overdo it or it could look a little strange. Add the personalization, send it to yourself and see how it sounds to you if you were getting it from someone else.

5. Choosing the Sender Name

If you are wondering who you should send the email from, it depends. According to Upsellit, if a reader would recognize the sender name, you want to use the sender’s name vs a company name. This has been shown to increase open rates because of the personal touch. This is especially true if the reader is fond of the person attached to the name.

You can even use Mary Smith [Company XYZ] if you want to brand the company name and make sure that people remember why the email is being sent to them. If you aren’t sure which one is going to work best for you, do a A/B test and see which one gets the most opens.

6. Test Different Browsers & Email Providers

While you might have opened your email from your computer and phone, that isn’t enough to see if your template design and content looks good. You need to see what it looks like on a lot of different screens. Some email providers will give you a preview option to see many variations of email opens on different web browsers and computer screens. See if your email provider offers this, but make sure that you find a way to test.

7. Analyze Your Results

Once you have sent your email newsletter and you have some data to analyze, it is time to see what is working for you. This is just the beginning and there are many more tests to do, but you got the hardest part out of the way. Clicking that send button. Congratulations.

Look at the information you now have such as open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe numbers and bouncing emails. These stats are a great place to start when you are checking to see how your new marketing strategy is working.

Conclusion

More than 34% of the people worldwide use email. It’s predicted  to increase to 2.8 billion email users in the next 2 years. Email marketing will continue to be an essential tool for businesses into the foreseeable future. Wise business owners will do well to follow these steps and draft the most appropriate email strategy for their business.

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