How to Start a Newsletter in 7 Easy Steps

If you are here, you might probably have two questions in mind – ‘Why do you need to send a newsletter?’, and ‘How to start a newsletter?’.

Answering your first question, even with the vast popularity of other marketing and advertising channels, email marketing is still the most effective way of generating revenue. Email marketing produces revenue of nearly 4300% for businesses, and over 90% of consumers preferred receiving updates via an email newsletter. 

Given the stats, it’s clear that email marketing captures monetary values and it is worth consideration for the growth of businesses. That being said, now we address the second question – ‘How to start a newsletter?’. 

Here are 7 easy steps to start a newsletter:

1. Find The Right Tool For Your Effective Newsletter Campaign

Back in the day, many businesses send newsletters by assembling a mailing list and pasting the email addresses into the BCC field of an Outlook message. 

This was a very time-consuming and ineffective way to go about things because:

  • The newsletters they sent looked quite unprofessional
  • Important statistics like clickthrough and open rates couldn’t be measured
  • The emails might likely ended up in the spam folder due to pour deliverability

Dedicated email marketing software were created just for these issues. Using a proper email marketing platform, businesses could:

  • Import and export a large scale database
  • Create strikingly designed
  • Integrate to a CRM software 
  • Automate work processes
  • Combine SMS marketing 
  • And much more

When choosing an email marketing tool, make sure you consider the following:

  • Your business size – small, medium, or enterprise.
  • The size of your mailing list and the expected growth in the upcoming months.
  • The number of people who will be using an email marketing software. Will it be just you, or the entire marketing team?
  • The list of features you would want in the email marketing software – contact list management, automated workflows, CRM integrations, etc.
  • Your budget. Do you want a pricier option or an affordable one?

The right email marketing tool when starting a newsletter vary from business to business. It mainly depends on your comfort level, workflow, budget, etc. 

So, choose an email marketing tool based on your requirements so that you can create the best systematic and repeatable processes. 

start a newsletter checklist

2. Use Strong Landing Pages 

Having a well-constructed newsletter is essential, but having a landing page that converts readers into taking the desired action is even more important. Typically, you don’t want your landing page to be filled with a huge number of calls to action or links – rather, it’s better to have a page that drives the visitors to take one specific action, be it completing a form, or buying a product. 

Keep your landing pages equally attractive as your newsletters, and ensure that they are easy-to-use, and focused mainly on conversion. Several email marketing software offer a landing page builder as a part of the monthly plan. You can use such simple drag-n’-drop landing page creator to easily build your landing page that drives more actions. 

check out this great example by the Munchary,  all it takes is a quick message, a very appealing image and take a look at that CTA. It offers the visitor to go straight to the next stage and without any commitment – just the zip code!

how to start a newsletter landing page

3. Build Your Email List Subscribers

Your email list is one of the important factors to start a newsletter. Rather than collecting hundreds and thousands of email addresses of uninterested people, you have to build relationships and create an email list full of consumers eager to buy your products. 

The following tips will help you with collecting subscribers or lead generation as we call it. 

  • Understand what your target audience wants and offer only relevant content
  • Create a landing page for your social media followers, and post or tweet the link across all channels. (Add a link to your email signature as well).
  • Pepper your website with email registration forms on every main page of your site, and on pages for popular services and products.
  • Ask your visitors to complete an opt-in form in order to download a value offer you might have like an e-book or catalog.
  • Run a PPC campaign where the users are taken to your page dedicated to gathering customers’ emails. 

start a newsletter lead generation

4. Make Sure You Are Legally Compliant

Permission-based email marketing is a factor that must consider before hitting the ‘Send’ button. The two biggest laws that you will need to worry about are CAN-SPAM and GDPR.

  • Opt-out – This law requires that the footer of your email includes your address and an easy way to unsubscribe from your emails. 
  • GDPR – A privacy law established in 2018, states that email newsletter should only be sent to people who have manually opted to receive them. For instance, you cannot manually check the ‘opt-in’ box wherever you collect email subscribers on your website. Your users should be given the option to deliberately check in the box themselves. 

5. Identify Your Niche And Decide On What You Want Send

Once you focus on a goal for your newsletter, you will find the right content for it. You need to find a niche before you start creating content for your newsletter. There are two ways in which you could find content – Active and Passive Searching. 

Active searching is when you go on a hunt for the content that will solve a particular goal. On the other hand, any other content that you stumble upon while during this search, but realize it will fit into your niche nicely is called Passive. 

Research is the key to curating content, and this includes researching both your audiences’ needs – why they would want to open and read your newsletters and the content topics. You can gather content from social media accounts, internal newsletters, and training documents. 

Additionally, also decide on when and how many times a month you would send out newsletters. You don’t want your subscribers to forget about you by taking long gaps in between subsequent newsletters but at the same time, you also don’t want to overwhelm them. You can send newsletters as infrequently as once per month or as frequently as once per week or even every day if you’re an e-commerce brand.

Take a look at this great newsletter by Moo, a printing brand. The CTA is vague but it’s so on point for the niche audience. 

how to start a newsletter email

6. Setting Up KPIs

Once you start a newsletter, you need to set up KPIs so that you could measure how it performs and make improvements based on the results. Your KPIs mainly depends on your goals, and a few of the key performance indicators you could use are as follows:

  • Conversion – The percentage of email recipients who completed the desired action.
  • Open Rate – The number of recipients who opened your email.
  • Click-through Rate – The amount of click on the links within your emails divided by the number of emails delivered then times by 100.
  • Unsubscribe Rate – The number of recipients who unsubscribed your emails.
  • Bounce Rate – The percentage of undeliverable email.
  • Delivery Rate – The number of emails sent vs. the number of emails delivered. 
  • List Growth – The number of new email addresses in your email list.

how to start a newsletter kpis

7. Optimizing Your Newsletters

Once you have a decent well-organized contact list, you should ensure that they are segmented. This helps you send appropriate messages to appropriate prospects at the right time.

Additionally, A/B testing is another feature you could use to determine what kind of newsletters works the best with your audience. Experiment with your subject lines, content, send time, etc. 

Finally, before you start a newsletter, ensure that you are obeying the law and not over-communicating with your subscribers. ActiveTrail could be the answer to all your questions related to starting a newsletter. With an amazing array of features, it helps you with newsletter templates to optimization.

Read more:

10 Winning Email Marketing Ideas for Hotels

5 Things You Should Know About the Future of Marketing Automation

25 Email Marketing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know in 2019