How To Start a Newsletter (A Complete Guide )

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What is a newsletter?

So you might be wondering, what is a newsletter? An Email Newsletter is an email you receive Every period of time to your inbox, it might be from an Ecommerce Store that you gave your email to or an Online Magazine that you are subscribed to, these companies utilize email marketing to display new content or offers to their existing audience, that the company already knows are interested in their products, now that you know what a newsletter is, let us learn how to start a newsletter, and how to be successful with email marketing.

 Why you business needs a newsletter

Whether you have a blog, consulting business, or an online store, having a newsletter can help you get recurring visitors, more customers, and just having a valuable email list that you can monetize, by sending them new offers, or by starting a newsletter like, the Morning Brew, The Hustle, or our own, Weekly Drip, which you can join for free.

For ecommerce, one of the best ways to generate revenue without any extra money spent on advertising is using email marketing, 4.03 Billion people use email, and you can leverage those people who are interested in your brand by sending out weekly or monthly newsletters, showcasing new deals or offers that are running on your store today.

so as you can see, you are leaving alot of revenue or exposure on the table if you dont do email marketing,

but there are two questions, which are;

How do I get their email?

How do I get started with email marketing? 

well, dear reader, we are going to answer all your questions.

 How to get your customer’s email address.

getting their email is easy, most of the email sending tools below have some sort of way of getting their emails, but they are usually weaker, and with less functionality than a purpose-built tool for just collecting emails, or you can add a widget to the sidebar as we have on this website, but most themes push the sidebar widgets to the bottom on mobile, so we suggest adding a popup or something on the header using the following tools.

1. Hello Bar – The Best All Around Tool For WordPress

If your website uses WordPress which power 37% of websites, then you probably read an article by this guy, This is Neil Patel, an SEO and marketing Expert, and he created The Hello Bar plugin for users of WordPress to use, and he personally uses it on his website, which is one of the biggest marketing and SEO blogs in the world, and if its good enough for his website, then its good for yours.

with 100s of themes and multiple times of pop-ups, you are never going to run out of options, and it isn’t only for WordPress, it’s available for Shopify and Wix as well as more.

Notable Features:

• Prebuilt Themes
• Design Assistant
• A/B testing

2. Privy – The best for ecommerce and shopify

So, Privy! they are a software company that offers, email collection tools that offer a lot of customizations, to their email collection tools, which is something that all the other tools do offer to some extent, but what Privy different, is unlike other tools that collect your email and just stop at that, you can create your newsletter with their service as well, but you might run into some issues, primarily some features are going to feel constricting, unlike the tools we are going to mention below.

They also offer an SMS marketing service, but you are going to run into the same issues mentioned above unlike using purpose-built SMS marketing tools, like SMSBump.

Features:

• Cart Abandonment Emails
• Welcome Emails
• Free Shipping Header Bar
• Automated Customer Win-Back Emails
• Great Third Party Integrations
• Facebook Messenger One-Click Install

The best email marketing tools

1. Campaign Monitor – The Best Newsletter Tool For Beginners

So now that you have their email, you have to test email marketing out, and I would suggest starting out with Campaign Monitor, they have a free trial, that offers all you need at the start, and then later you can switch to another tool, or start paying them.

their features are complicated for beginners, but ill list them out here so you can refer back later.

Notable Features:

• Email Builder
• Segmentation
• Broken Link Checker
• Personlization
• Sign-Up Forms
• Detailed Analytics

2. GetResponse – The Best Email Marketing Tool

GetResponse is one of the leaders in this space, they’re the best for starting a newsletter for any industry, or niche, and making your newsletter worth reading for your audience.

Packed Full of Features, GetResponse Should be on everyone’s shortlist of email marketing tools, as their features are incomparable with their competitors, Like Web Push Notifications, Marketing Automation, Conversion Funnel Builder, and more.

also, if you use this link, you can test out the tool using their free forever plan, and you can switch to another tool later if you don’t like it

Notable Features:

• SMS Marketing
• Conversion Funnel Builder
• Marketing Automation
• AutoResponders
• Analytics

3. Klaviyo – Email Marketing Tool For Ecommerce

there’s a reason this is on the list, it’s the one mostly used by Beginners for starting email marketing, they offer all the tools you need for your newsletter and more tools that will help make the most out of your email list that has been collecting dust since you started your website.

and what makes Klaviyo one of the best in this space, is their great feature list, like segmentation, and email list nurturing, which might not be useful now, but will be amazing down the line.

Notable Features:

• Welcome Emails
• Strong Segmentation
• Powerful Integration With Third-Party Tools
• Email Personlization
• Powerful Reporting

4. OmniSend – Powerful Email marketing Tool For Ecommerce

there are two main contenders for email marketing tools for this space, Klaviyo, and OmniSend, which is why I put them right after each other so you can compare between the two. OmniSend has most of what Klaviyo has. like offering another great medium of advertising which isn’t talked about a lot, and that is web push notifications, as well as segmentation and audience sync for ads.

and if you are migrating from another service, you can use the free migration tool, and for a limited time if you purchase through this link, you can get 40% OFF for three months, this deal is only available until the end of the year, so get onto it now!

Notable Features:

• Segmentation
• Web Push Notifcations
• audience sync for advertising

5. SendFox – The Best For Starting a Personal Newsletter

well, what if you want to create a newsletter with a more “personal” feeling, well that’s where SendFox comes in, they are a tool created by the AppSumo Team, and they offer a newsletter tool that integrates well with Sumo, their email collection tool, and its completely “free”, but it’s very constricting, I’d suggest buying their $49 one time payment, as it unlocks so much more, but their greatest feature is, automatic content syndication from an RSS feed or a website feed, which is a game-changer for people who don’t have time to write a newsletter every week.

and what makes sendfox stand out from the rest is that they aren’t too complicated, which isn’t a bad thing, but if you want to get more technical down the line, I’d suggest using another tool, because switching email tools isn’t as easy as it might seem, and it can really hurt your SEO, so you should consult an expert for that.

Notable Features:

• Minimal Dashboard
• Automatic Newsletter Maker
• Refferal Campaign maker

6. MooSend – The Best Free Email Marketing Tool

so if you are just getting started with email marketing, then you might not have the budget to test out a tool that is pricey, then you can try MooSend, as their free plan is SO much better than other Free Plans on the market.

But their features are worth paying for another plan later, especially their CRM tools and personalization features, which make it a great deal.

Notable Features:

• Powerful Free Plan
• CRM Features
• Personlization
• Cutsom Reports

Structring Your Newsletters

so now that you have picked your tools, the next step is to structure your emails, depending on the tool you’ve picked, this process will be different, so ill just give you a general outline of what you should do.

You can download a checklist here that includes everything you need to do to publish a post, it’s a great complementary item to this article.

Figure out what type of newsletter you are building

if you have an ecommerce store, then your options are going to be a bit limited here, i’d suggest only showing your sales or new products every email you send, maybe adding a story about the company in there for more variety.

if you have a blog, then you can create something like The Hustle, or The Morning Brew, and just post notable events and breaking news in your industry.

and also you can create a personal newsletter for yourself if that’s what you want, The Possibilities are really endless here,but if you come up with something new, You have a bigger chance of succeeding.

Create Content For your newsletter

now you have to search for content to populate your newsletter, if you release News Based emails then you can populate it using any news sources that you prefer, maybe even check subreddits in your niche, or you can use an RSS reader app, and add some news websites feeds into it and add a couple of stories that pique your interest from there.

Design Your Newsletter

now before you start writing the actual Newsletter, you need to design it first, Usually, Your email tool will have a couple of templates, but if you find one you truly like, then more than likely a large number of newsletters also use that template.

so the thing to do is to get a custom template, if you know HTML and CSS, you can design a template, or hire a designer, but that can get pricey depending on the complexity, and the designers/developers Experience, but make sure to add areas to include images, as without them your newsletter is going to look too bland.

also when designing, keep in mind that not all readers will read on the same device, usually, you can use the universal size which is 600px wide with 30px padding on either side, and for height, your Newsletter can be as long as you want, but don’t go overboard, as most people won’t read your email if it’s really long, and if they skim through it, they might miss the most important parts, and also not convert through to your website.

Insert Content into your Email

So we’re getting closer to the end, depending on your design, your email might have an area for images, text only, or other types.

keep it short, as that increases CTR, and then Edit it, then Edit it again, and AGAIN, you get the point, make sure you perfect it, and ask yourself, would you read this email, daily, or weekly, or whenever you send it.

you can also send it to a coworker or friend, and ask for feedback, and make SURE there aren’t any spelling errors, you don’t want people to join and then unsubscribe or report you as spam.

Personalize your email

The best emails you receive, are the ones that feel like they’re sent personally to you, even though they aren’t, and the way to make your newsletters also feel like this is using personalization tokens, if your email software supports it, which most of the ones above do, but make sure you check in case it doesn’t.

adding these tokens will take your Newsletters to the next level, also it will reduce your unsubscribe rate by a huge amount.

also, if your tool supports segmentation, you can pick what part of your audience gets this email.

Adjust Subejct Line And Sender Name

changing these variables can really change a lot, Sender name should probably be a human name to make it feel more personal, setting the name to, “Name@Company” or something like that, is probably the best since it includes someone’s name and also the company, so your reader immediately knows who it’s from.

I would also suggest changing the subject line every time, because it will increase your CTR, and make the email less predictable every time.

Also, This is very important, Don’t send emails from your personal email, if you have a business email plan, you can create a new email just for email marketing but starting out with a Gmail or another domain is fine at the start.

Send Your Email

and here we are, the most important moment of this guide, sending your newsletter, but don’t just send it straight away, you should read it one last time, and then schedule it a week from now, in case you want to some last-minute changes, and every week or month, you should send the newsletter at the same time every time.

and again, depending on the tool, you can ask for feedback at the bottom of the email, and try to quickly implement what your audience wants.

Analyze and Test

but it’s not over yet, you should do A/B tests frequently if your Software allows that, and try to perfect it, and make sure it’s always the best quality you can make.

if you plan on including links to your website, try to add UTM tags to them, using the google tag manager, to track where your traffic comes from, you can look up a tutorial when you decide on doing that because it is pretty complicated to begin.

Final Words

And NOW were done, if you went through this guide fully, then you should have a newsletter going out next week, and a respectably sized email list, if you want to download the steps we included in the article, you can Download The checklist Mentioned above.

also, don’t try to hide the unsubscribe buttons on your Newsletter, it’s a bad tactic, and having a big email list doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good email list.

The more your list grows, the more you are going to pay to your email software, so I would suggest using a tool like Bouncer to make sure the emails inside are not fake.

One of the best ways to collect emails is by giving something in return of their email address, like giving them a free ebook made for your industry, just don’t steal the ebook from someone else, you should hire a freelancer to make it for you, or make it yourself.