Whether you're launching a new product, trying to grow your business, or want to keep in touch with your customers, having a newsletter can be a powerful tool to help you accomplish all these things. Whilst starting your own newsletter might seem like an investment for your small business, following this step-by-step guide will allow you to easily and effectively augment your marketing strategy with a successful email newsletter.
Define your audience
Before launching your newsletter, you should determine who your target audience will be. For example, will you be targeting existing customers or people who have downloaded one of your marketing assets? If you can segment your website visitors into multiple user groups, you can consider creating persona specific newsletters to offer a more tailored experience and increase the likelihood of conversions.
Defining your audience is a fundamental step when launching a newsletter, as it establishes the foundation for crafting relevant and engaging content. Understanding the demographics, preferences, and interests of your target readership allows you to create tailored newsletters that resonate with their needs. Utilising skills like knowing how to scrape google can provide valuable insights on user behaviour, to refine your content strategy and effectively connect with your audience
Define your topic and purpose
Once you have defined your audience, you need to determine a purpose for your newsletter so that new subscribers can opt-in to receiving your content. For example, your newsletter might provide monthly product updates or weekly articles published on your blog. If you are going to share information beyond product or content updates, consider using the same structure for your emails in order to ensure a consistent newsletter content experience to your readers.
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Choose your email marketing software
Whilst you can build and maintain a subscriber list in a spreadsheet and send your newsletter manually via email, using a third party platform can provide reader metrics and reduce your workload as you grow your following thanks to automation. Moreover, these platforms can help prove your compliance with EU and UK GDPR. The main newsletter platforms are Substack and mailchimp but CRMs and website builders like Hubspot sometimes offer newsletter capabilities. You can also build newsletters on LinkedIn. You should choose email marketing tools based on their compatibility with your workflow and your audience.
Design your newsletter
The newsletter design is really important as it will impact open rates, click-through rates and ultimately the long term success of your newsletter. The newsletter template styling and fonts should be responsive so that your emails can be read on mobile devices. The images should also be lightweight so that they can be downloaded on weak internet connections. Structure your newsletter with headers to improve the readability of your content. The call-to-actions (CTAs) should also be clear to increase the likelihood of clicks. To improve your open rates, A/B test your subject lines and content length. Finally, to minimise unsubscribes, make your that your audience understands what type of content they will receive and how frequently. This can be communicated to new subscribers in your welcome email. This email can also reduce the likelihood of gmail or outlook flagging your future emails as spam by encouraging the reader to add your newsletter's email to their address book.
Build your audience
Whilst your first newsletter might start with 1 or 2 subscribers, you can quickly build an email list by advertising your newsletter to your potential audience. Share your newsletter's landing page in social media groups and collect email subscribers using popups on relevant pages of your website. You can also email your network with sign-up forms to seed your initial subscriber list.
As you grow your newsletter using these steps, ensure you are constantly monitoring your metrics in order to optimise them. To increase the impact of your efforts, ensure your newsletter complements your existing digital marketing strategies. If you are considering hiring a digital marketing intern of a part-time consultant, consider using Legislate for your legal contracts. Legislate allows you tailor lawyer-approved contracts to your specific requirements on no legal budget. Get started today for only £9.95.
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The opinions on this page are for general information purposes only and do not constitute legal advice on which you should rely.