How to Create a Newsletter (and a Powerful Email Marketing Campaign)

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In this post, I’m going to show you how to create a newsletter in 10 simple steps (and design a really effective email marketing campaign).

There are two ways to use this resource. You can either watch our ‘quick start’ video guide to creating an email newsletter below, or for more detailed tips on how to get going with email marketing, read the whole article. For best results, I suggest doing both!

You’re probably here because you’re taking your first steps into the world of e-newsletters and email marketing.

If so, congratulations! With a little bit of planning and the right tools, you can create really effective newsletters and email campaigns that have a very positive impact on your business.

It can be hard to know where to start with email marketing though, so in this post I’ll walk you through the steps you need to take to:

But first…why do you need to send e-newsletters in the first place?

Why newsletters still matter

Given the popularity of social media and online advertising as ways of generating business right now, it’s tempting to think of the humble e-newsletter as a bit quaint or outdated.

But this is a big mistake.

Even with the huge range of other marketing and advertising options now available, email marketing can be a fantastically effective way to generate revenue — and one you don’t want to miss out on.

According to inbound marketing experts Hubspot, email marketing has a return of investment of $36 to every $1 spent on it; and Statista’s research indicates that the number of email users worldwide is set to reach 4.6 billion by 2025.

Given these sorts of numbers, it’s clear that every email address you capture has a monetary value — and that email is still a highly popular communication channel.

In short, email and e-newsletters remain absolutely essential to the successful development of a business.

So, follow our checklist below to create the best e-newsletters and email marketing campaigns that you possibly can.

Let’s go!

1. Start with the most important thing: your data

Before you think about ‘how’ you are going to send an e-newsletter, you need to think about the ‘who’ – the individuals that you’d like to communicate with via email.

In order to send the most relevant e-newsletters that generate the most revenue, you need as good a mailing list database as possible.

Now, a lot of businesses have their contacts’ email addresses tucked away in a messy spreadsheet somewhere – or more likely, spread across several very messy spreadsheets!

Or it might even be the case that a lot of email marketing data has been captured in physical format — for example, via application forms, customer files and other types of paperwork.

Regardless of where your email addresses live though, it’s a good idea to digitize and consolidate all of them into one clean, well-organized database before you try to send any newsletters to the contacts on them.

(Tools like Excel or Google Sheets make it easy to do this — just create a new spreadsheet using either tool, and enter your email addresses into it).

Next, ensure that your email database is segmented as well as possible — this means putting a field (column) in your spreadsheet that you use to categorize people as

and so on.

How far you take this process is entirely up to you — you could, for example, segment your mailing list exhaustively, storing detailed information about product purchases, sign-up dates, demographics etc. in it.

Or, you could keep things fairly simple and make do with a simple list of email addresses and lead types. Ultimately, the right approach for you will depend on the nature of your business — and how targeted you need your mailouts to be.

Either way, the basic aim of the exercise is to get your data ‘into shape’ — so that you are able to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

When you’ve finished your database preparation, you should have a spreadsheet that contains all your cleaned, segmented data in one place.

This is your mailing list, which can now be uploaded to an email marketing app (I’ll discuss email marketing apps in just a moment).

2. Create your content plan and newsletter schedule

The next step is to plan your communications very carefully.

This means creating an e-communications schedule that maps out:

You can then refer to this e-communications schedule throughout the year — and ensure you have all the necessary content ready to go well in advance of each e-newsletter broadcast.

And, because you’ll have segmented your data neatly in advance — see step 1, above! — you will be sending your beautiful, interesting e-newsletters to precisely the right group of recipients.

3. Pick the right app for sending your newsletter

Many small business owners still think that sending e-newsletters means compiling a list of email addresses, and then copying and pasting them into the BCC field of a clunky-looking Outlook message.

This is a very time-consuming way to go about things — and it’s also very ineffective, because:

Accordingly, it is a much better idea to use a dedicated email marketing tool for sending your e-newsletter — one that lets you send ‘HTML newsletters.’

HTML newsletters, as their name suggests, use HTML code to display text and graphics in a way that meets your brand requirements.

There are many web-based solutions you can use to send HTML newsletters: popular options include GetResponse, AWeber, Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.

All the apps mentioned above allow you to:

Now, it’s important to note that these tools don’t require you to know anything about HTML code to use them — you simply use a drag and drop tool to design your newsletter, and the app creates all the necessary HTML automatically in the background for you.

(You can usually edit your HTML if you like — but unless you have very specific design requirements, there isn’t usually a need to).

Now, there are pros and cons to all of the apps I’ve mentioned above — so if you’d like to research them further, do check out some of our email marketing app comparisons:

You may also find that your website building or ecommerce platform may facilitate some email marketing.

For example, if you use Wix or Shopify to manage your online store, you’ll find that both platforms now offer built-in email marketing features; an add-on for Squarespace is also available (Squarespace Email Campaigns) that lets you send newsletters too.

(Check out our Shopify vs Squarespace or our Wix vs Shopify posts for more details on these built-in email marketing tools.)

These website builder-based solutions tend to be much more basic than the email marketing apps mentioned above — but if your needs are simple, they can definitely do the job.

Let’s move on now to newsletter templates.

4. Choose or design an e-newsletter template

Once you’ve decided on which email marketing app you’re going to use, you need to consider how your newsletters are going to look.

The good news is that all the solutions mentioned above provide a wide range of professionally-designed newsletter templates that you can use as the starting point for your e-newsletter design.

When you’ve picked a template, you can then tweak its design elements using a drag and drop editor. This ensures that your e-newsletter design is consistent with your brand.

You can then save this as your own template, and use it for future newsletters.

Now, if your design skills are not particularly strong, you could consider hiring a designer to create ‘bespoke,’ coded e-newsletter template.

But in most cases, you should be absolutely fine with using one of the options available from your email marketing app’s template library.

5. Embed sign-up forms on your website

All the major email marketing tools make it easy to embed sign-up forms for your mailing list on your website.

(Usually this just involves grabbing a snippet of code and adding it as a HTML block on your website.)

Make sure you do this, as it is one of the best things you can do to grow your email list.

Ideally, you should have a sign-up form for your e-newsletter on every page of your website, and you could also consider using pop-up boxes on certain pages of your site too to maximize the number of sign ups to your mailing list.

(Yes, pop-ups can be a bit annoying — but they are very effective).

Be careful with how you use pop-ups on mobile devices however — Google can penalize sites that use pop-up boxes in a way that impacts usability in a negative way.

Now, when adding forms to your site, don’t make them boring! Make sure they spell out the benefits of joining your mailing list — i.e., rather than using a bland ‘join my mailing list’ call-to-action, explain what sort of great newsletter content your site visitors can expect to receive upon subscription.

Depending on the social media services you use, it’s often possible to add sign-up forms or buttons to your social profiles too. Do this where possible, and where it’s not, provide a prominent link to a URL where people can join your list.

6. Use landing pages that maximize signups

If you use online ads to grow your mailing list, make sure that the landing pages you use for your campaigns are as strong as possible.

When somebody clicks on your ad, they should be taken to a page that encourages them to take one specific action: signing up to your mailing list.

This generally means building landing pages that don’t contain a navigation bar or links to any other parts of your site: everything should be about focusing a visitor’s attention onto a sign-up form.

(These types of landing pages tend to be known as ‘squeeze pages’: they literally ‘squeeze’ the user onto your mailing list!).

Some email marketing tools, like GetResponse and Mailchimp, provide you with built-in landing page builders — but if your email marketing tool doesn’t come with this functionality, you can use third-party tools like Instapage or Unbounce to create them.

7. Test your e-newsletters carefully

By now you should have:

…and it’s finally time to start sending some e-newsletters!

But it’s really important to send them in the best way possible, and this involves some testing.

There are generally three steps that need to be taken here.

Step 1: Check that your e-newsletter is arriving safely

The first test you’ll need to do on any newsletter you create is a simple one — you need to make sure that your e-newsletter is arriving safely in inboxes (i.e., that it’s not ending up in a spam folder).

Professional email marketing solutions always let you send test versions of your newsletters, so use this functionality to send a test message to a few different types of email clients – Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo etc. — and check that it’s not being routed into your junk.

Some email marketing apps also provide you with a ‘spam score’ for any newsletters you create. As the name suggests, this indicates how big the chances are of your newsletter ending up in a spam folder rather than a main inbox — you want this score to be as low as possible.

Typically, apps that provide a spam score also give you suggestions on how to improve your newsletter so that the chances of a safe delivery are maximised — follow them!

Step 2: Check that your e-newsletter is displaying correctly

How your e-newsletters display in different contexts can vary considerably.

Sometimes an email that looks great in Outlook can look terrible in Gmail, or the desktop version of a message can look fantastic, while the mobile version is all messed up.

As email marketing apps have become more sophisticated over the years, this is less of a problem than it used to be — but consistency issues can still crop up.

So, always check that your message is displaying as intended across a wide range of devices and email programs — and edit your template accordingly — before doing your final newsletter broadcast.

(If your email marketing tool has an ‘inbox preview’ feature, you can use this to help with this).

And finally, if you’ve used any personalization tags in your messages (for example, inserting a subscriber’s name into your e-newsletter’s content or subject header), ensure these are displaying correctly too. There’s nothing worse than an e-newsletter that starts ‘Dear [First Name]’…

Step 3: Split test your messages

Split testing (also known as ‘A/B testing’) involves trying out different versions of your message on a relatively small sample of your data before sending it to the remainder of your mailing list.

You could, for example, create three versions of the same newsletter, each with a different subject line, and send it to 1,000 people on your database. After a few hours, you’ll be able to identify which subject line led to the best open rate, and then send an email with the ‘winning’ subject line to the remainder of your list.

(Helpfully, a lot of email marketing tools do this automatically for you).

Note that split testing is only worth doing if you have a relatively large mailing list — if your list only contains a couple of hundred email addresses, you may find that split testing doesn’t really lead to particularly meaningful or useful results.

8. Measure success!

Most e-newsletter tools come with extensive reporting features – after sending an e-newsletter, you should be able to access statistics that let you measure the performance of your e-newsletters and email marketing campaigns.

The key things you usually need to look at are:

You can use these statistics to help you create better e-newsletters that generate more conversions in future.

For example…

These sorts of findings can really help you understand what’s working and not with your e-newsletter campaigns — and ultimately improve their effectiveness.

9. Make the most of autoresponders and marketing automation

A fantastic way to send e-newsletters involves autoresponders or ‘drip’ campaigns — automated emails that you can program so that when somebody signs up to your mailing list, they automatically receive messages of your choosing, at intervals of your choosing.

For example, a subscriber could get…

…and so on.

Used creatively and carefully, autoresponders allow you to craft a strategy that keeps your email subscribers engaged, and can generate more sales of your products and services.

Recently, some of the major email marketing app providers have taken autoresponder functionality to a new and far more sophisticated level, providing ‘marketing automation’ functionality that allows you to use user actions to trigger emails.

For example, you can instruct your email marketing software to automatically send a follow-up email if a subscriber…

…and so on.

Some email marketing tools even allow you to move a subscriber along a CRM sales pipeline automatically if they take a particular action.

It’s amazing, if slightly scary, stuff!

10. Make it easy to share your newsletters

Most email marketing tools allow you to add ‘forward to a friend’ or social media sharing buttons to your e-newsletters.

So, add them! It means that your content and offers get a better chance of being seen by an audience outside of your mailing list, and may also result in new people joining your list as a result of word-of-mouth activity.

And finally: follow best practice

Every time you create or send an e-newsletter, you should ensure that you are…

Otherwise, you risk at best a higher unsubscribe rate — and at worst facing your email marketing app account being suspended, fines and legal action.

Here are some key suggestions on how to follow best practice and the law when sending newsletters and working on email marketing campaigns:

I hope you found these tips on how to create a newsletter and improve your email marketing useful — and that you’re now in a better place to create your own fantastic campaigns!