How to create a great newsletter?

Many people think that newsletter, as a marketing tool is over, customers are just annoyed with it, nobody reads it anymore, it is just a waste of the marketing budget.

It is true, that it is getting harder to get your company noticed with a newsletter, as people’s email inboxes are overflowing with them. However, it can still be a highly effective tool to reach your customers, if you can create a letter/system that is unique enough, that people will look forward to receiving it and reading it every week.
Swiss Tomato is happy to help you with creating an amazing newsletter for you business, and with all your digital marketing needs.
Here are our tips on creating a great newsletter:

1. First step: what is the goal of your newsletter?

You need to have a clear goal before writing your first newsletter, and decide what you want to achieve with it. This will determine the style, the content and the design of the newsletter. You should also decide how often you want to send it out. Your goal can be:

• sending traffic to your website
• building your brand and finding new customers
• introducing a new product/service (for example a new app)
• increasing brand loyalty
• creating buzz with some special offers
• educating your customers about your industry

2. Subject line: the first thing they see

Your subject line should be short and raise interest, but should also relate to the content of the newsletter, people don’t like being fooled by titles. Remember, that your subject line is crucial, you want people to click on it, and then actually read your letter.

3. Structured body + eye-catching design

After reading the subject line, the first thing people notice when they open your newsletter is the design and look of it. It needs to look stylish, but not too much, these days people tend to prefer minimalistic designs compared to the really colourful and in-your-face look of old newsletters.

4. Relevant information

You created a fantastic subject line, and people opened your newsletter, great. Now comes the important part: to actually provide value to the readers, and make the letter worth reading. The letter needs to contain relevant information for your target group, and should be written in the appropriate style, that speaks to them. I mentioned value, and for a reason, the newsletter shouldn’t be just ads about your company or your products, it should give something to the reader, maybe some interesting news, or educational information, and should include only a little bit of promotion. Include no more than 3-5 articles in your newsletter and consider including information/posts from other websites as well, that you find relevant and think your readers would as well.

5. Make them click

While providing interesting information in the newsletter is important, your goal is to make your readers click, so don’t include a complete article/offer in your newsletter, just make it a teaser to raise interest, and make readers click and go to your website for the rest. Also, don’t forget to include a call to action in the newsletter to encourage clicking, for example time-sensitive offers, or special offers to the readers, or those who open your emails. Make your readers feel special, give them a reward for reading your newsletter.

6. Measure and analyse

You have written and sent out your newsletter, but the work is not done. It is really important to track the results of the email, to be able to see if it is working or not, and to be able to learn from the mistakes. You can measure the open and bounce rate, the number of unsubscribers, and the clicks on the website that resulted from the newsletter. If you are just starting out, it might be a good idea to do A/B testing on a small sample of your target readers, and then send the newsletter version that was working to the whole group.
A good tool that we recommend is MailChimp, which makes it really easy and fun to create your first newsletter with good-looking templates and clear metrics to analyse your results.
If you have comments, questions or have app development or web design needs, please contact us.