Newsletter Email Marketing for Beginners
Published July 3, 2022.
Investing in newsletter email marketing can be an excellent way for beginners in the branding and marketing world to build a relationship with their target audience. Newsletters are an opportunity to keep your brand top-of-mind with your customers, encourage repeat purchases, and even build trust among your community.
Often used as part of a comprehensive email marketing strategy, newsletters can boost audience engagement, and even transform customers into advocates. However, you need to know how to use these tools correctly.
What Is the Purpose of Newsletter Email Marketing?
An email newsletter isn’t exactly the same as a comprehensive email marketing strategy. Newsletters are designed to share regular news, updates, and information with your target audience.
Generally, they’re structured emails that give your audience more insights about your brand and business, rather than focusing on selling products.
Pros
- Newsletters are excellent for telling stories that build customer relationships
- They keep you top of mind with your audience, so customers don’t forget you
- Newsletter analytics can give you an insight into the engagement levels of your audience
- They can help you generate interest in upcoming events and launches
- They help you earn the trust of customers by showing a level of transparency
Cons
- Not every customer will want to read a newsletter
- Good newsletters can take time and effort to put together
- They require you to collect subscribers through landing pages and sign up forms
While email newsletters are a unique customer retention method for many brands and an excellent way to build loyalty, they also won’t necessarily increase your sales.
What’s the Difference Between Email Marketing and Newsletters?
As mentioned above, email newsletters are generally just one part of a full email marketing strategy. Email newsletters are focused on informative and educational content. They might share information about your latest blog posts or give news on upcoming changes and events in the company. The purpose of newsletters is to inform readers, not push products.
An email marketing campaign, on the other hand, takes multiple approaches to nurture, inform, and convert followers. With an email marketing campaign, you might send newsletters to keep your brand top of mind, but you can also send out promotions to improve click-to-open rate and conversions.
An email marketing campaign can also include retention emails specifically designed to engage customers, welcome emails, and sale emails.
How to Create a Newsletter for Email Marketing
The key to success with an email newsletter is delivering the content your audience is most interested in. This is why it’s important to carefully assess your target audience before you start building your newsletter. Ask yourself who your target audience is, what the goals of your newsletter are (to increase web traffic or retention), and what kind of content you can send.
Once you have a clear view of the purpose of your newsletter, follow these steps:
- Choose an email newsletter tool to automate sending regular newsletters
- Choose a template and implement your content (such as blog posts, news reports, and even videos or podcast links)
- Add branding elements like your logo, company colors, and links to your social media profiles
- Set up your newsletter email lists—this will include all the contact emails you’ve collected from customers and subscribers on your landing pages
- Segment your list according to the kind of content you know customers will want to receive
- Experiment with subject lines to improve your chances of getting the best open rates and conversions.
- Make sure your email works on different browsers and ESP environments
- Send your emails according to a set schedule (such as once per week)
Remember, it’s important to analyze your audience’s response to your email newsletter by examining opening rates, click-through rates, and other user metrics, so you can optimize your content over time.