Increasingly, companies use newsletters to communicate with their subscribers and future customers. Over the last few decades, the Internet has become the perfect tool for building relationships with users, and email marketing has proven to be the strategy with the best return on investment.
But what is a newsletter? You may already know this term, but it is never too much to clarify the concepts again so that there is no kind of misunderstanding.
A newsletter is a kind of letter or periodical magazine that companies send to their subscribers via email as part of an Inbound Marketing strategy.
In this definition, I wanted to highlight subscribers because it is a fundamental part of the explanation.
Before you can start planning an email marketing strategy and send a newsletter, you’ll need to post relevant content on your website or blog.
You need to do your best to convince your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter; This will only happen if they love the information you are offering. You should always focus on quality when creating content, mainly because you are not alone on the web. If you are just another blog offering the same thing, why should anyone sign up for your newsletter?
Another prominent term is Inbound Marketing, which is nothing more than a method that combines non-invasive marketing and advertising strategies to contact a user early in the buying process and following them through the sales funnel.
Once the main concepts have been clarified, it’s time to look deeper into the main topic of today’s post, as well as some tips for creating an effective newsletter design. Also, we’ll show you how Mailrelay’s new newsletter editor works.
I don’t know if you work with an online sales site or a personal blog. Whatever it is, we’ll show you how a newsletter can help you.
The first thing you need to define is what you are looking for with your digital marketing strategy. If you own an online store, of course, your main goal will be to sell and therefore increase your conversion rate and get more leads. If you are working with a personal blog, your goal will be more focused on improving your brand image, improving engagement with readers, and attracting more visitors.
You could send a newsletter for all these goals. In fact, email is the communication channel with the best ROI, much better than social media. You’re increasingly interested, right?
As you can imagine, now that you know what a newsletter is and what it is for, the next step will be to set your goals. What do you want to get from your subscribers? How do you want to get it? How long are you willing to invest in creating content?
· How to select material for your site or blog
In connection with the above, a fundamental part of the process of creating a newsletter is all the work before sending an email.
To attract subscribers to your site, the first thing you need to do is get users interested in your content. To make this happen, not only will you have to think about people who already know your brand, but also, reach users who haven’t heard of you yet.
And how could you do that? One of the best options for promoting your brand is to create a content marketing strategy. But this doesn’t just mean writing about your products or services; you’ll need to cover topics relevant to your industry, so that when people search for something related to your business on Google, your page will be one of the first options.
To understand this more clearly, the best thing we can do is to see an example.
For this post, we will use as an example Mutua’s insurance website, a Spanish vehicle, housing, and health insurer; so on their blog, most people hope to find details about their insurance packages, health articles, automotive safety, home care.
But with a content marketing strategy focused only on these topics, they would only reach users previously interested in insurance. So what do they do to attract more visitors?
They post articles on smartwatches, home accessories, personal safety tips, and other topics relevant to their target customer profile.
Taking this example as a reference, you can be inspired to start posting quality, interesting content that will help you grow, foster branding, gain more leads, build trust, improve ROI, and increase your conversion rate.
· Tips for Preparing Effective Newsletter Design
Now, let’s get to the heart of the matter. Once you have decided to send a newsletter, it is time to design it and prepare it to help you reach your goals.
First of all: be patient. To reach your goals, you will first have to try a thousand and one ways to create a newsletter. Whether or not it will work depends not only on your ability to make it attractive and useful, but also on your target audience, their interests, and many other factors over which you will not have control.
So don’t be afraid to try different combinations until you find the one that works best for you.
Be clear about what you want to achieve with your newsletter and email marketing strategy. Also, never lose sight of your goal and, based on it, start planning the steps you will follow. So that you can do it the best way, here are some tips for preparing an effective newsletter layout.
► Choose the ideal platform.
Undoubtedly, something essential to sending a newsletter is choosing the right email marketing software for your budget and your needs. That’s why I recommend Mailrelay; not only because you can send a newsletter for free, but also because the software has been updated and the new version offers many advanced features.
When choosing an email marketing service, you must consider the additional tools you will need. For example, you may need an automation system or advanced subscriber segmentation options.
► Update and segment your database
Once you have selected an email marketing system, you will need to create an email list.
If you have never done so before, you will need to create a subscription form and collect email from your customers, always abiding by international data protection regulations.
Once you start collecting data, it’s time to segment your audience. Why should you target it? It is always essential to segment your leads and separate your contacts into smaller groups: It is very important to know who you are addressing, as you will need to tailor your language, strategy, and content to your buyer persona.
Targeting Options with Mailrelay V3:
You can send a different newsletter to different segments of your mailing list, depending on the criteria you previously set. This will increase your chances of persuading the subscriber reading your email to buy from you or visit your site.
Once you’ve segmented your subscribers, you can now establish who your audience is.
► Define your goal and your audience
For your newsletter to be genuinely effective, you must ensure that your target audience has been adequately targeted and know who you want to reach with your strategy.
Within the segments you have created, you will have to find your target audience. This will be your ideal customer, the lead profile you want to convert to a buyer. If you are not selling anything, your target should be the user who will be most interested in whatever you are offering. This step will be vital in defining your digital marketing strategy.
Finding and setting your goal is essential to know how to send the message, when, and by what means. Please understand that your primary goal should not just be to reach more people, but to “talk” directly to your target to focus your efforts on users potentially interested in your business.
Once your goal is set, the only thing left is to think about the newsletter design to tailor the layout to your brand.
First and foremost, you should know that you can create a plain text or HTML newsletter:
With Mailrelay V3, your newsletters will be in HTML format but don’t worry if you don’t know how to program because you have the option of working with ready-to-use, editable layout newsletter HTML templates.
If, on the other hand, you already have your own HTML code or prefer to do it yourself, don’t worry, you will also have the option to import it in different ways, depending on the size of your code.
Before you create a newsletter, you should consider the type of design your subscribers will prefer, so they will click on your email and return to your site.
To achieve this, you should know that, as a general rule, users generally prefer HTML newsletters. However, according to a Hubspot study, your subscriber is much more likely to return to your page if you use more text, as an email with several images or colors is generally considered a commercial message, meaning that many subscribers will close the email before they even read your message.
Also, depending on how the template was created, email servers like Gmail might consider it spam or send it to a different tab, which could affect your email marketing strategy.
After planning the content and design of your newsletter, you will have to customize your message. This will be vital to differentiate your message from your competitors.
To customize a newsletter with the new Mailrelay editor, you can include your subscriber’s name or some custom field with additional information. Another form of personalization is to use subscriber’s birthday as a custom field and send a newsletter with a special message or gift to this user.
If you don’t know how to use these customizations, we have two tutorials on our blog, where we explain how to use the new version of our editor. You can find them at the end of this post in the related articles section.
► You should use all the resources at your disposal to get the attention of your subscribers.
A good way to know if your newsletter was well designed is to think about whether you would open it or not. How many newsletters do you receive per day? Undoubtedly many, but do you open them all? Probably not, we just open the ones that get our attention.
For this reason, more and more companies choose to include emojis in their newsletters. They capture subscriber attention and improve open rates.
If you created an attractive design and segmented your database correctly, you will probably have positive results.
· Conclusion
Now you have all the tricks for preparing an effective newsletter design. All that remains is to start working on your email marketing strategy and embark on the adventure of testing and making mistakes with your projects and learning how to improve your conversion rate.
At this time, we can only wish you the best of luck by putting all these tips into practice and remember that if you have any questions with our new newsletter editor, our technical support team will be happy to help you.