A newsletter is said to be the best blogging asset, hence, as a blogger, acing the craft of creating a perfect newsletter is really crucial. A good newsletter that the audiences love has the power of getting them back and retaining them. For bloggers, a newsletter is a good communication tool that helps build relationships with your readers, customers, and contacts.
Creating a newsletter is a step towards sustainable success for bloggers that takes having an effective strategy, maintaining consistency, and curating an actionable plan. As a content writer, the focus of a perfect newsletter for you should be having relevant content that appeals to the audience.
As a blogger, you have to ensure optimizing the next applicable steps to make it a success. Considered as a great way to use links to take readers to specific sections, newsletters also help produce genuine results that eventually drive your sales.
In this article, we talk about the importance of having a newsletter, how to curate it and what are the essential steps to execute it.
What Is A Newsletter?
A newsletter is a strategy used by bloggers to consistently provide high-quality content to their subscribers to build value. It is usually in more detail, data-driven, and has actionable content. You can use it as a great way to maintain direct and fluid communication with your readers.
A newsletter is usually sent via emails to a built contact list of subscribers or to your readers who are most likely to open and read it within their email browser. An e-newsletter is similar to your social media feed, the content is presented in a vertical column that the readers can scroll down as they read ahead. It can be sent as an email, a link that redirects the readers to the page, or as an attachment in form of a PDF or JPG. Sending it as a PDF gives the reader a feel of a book, and makes it more readable compared to sending it as an email only.
Know that a newsletter is more than just sending an email to your subscribers on a regular basis. It is a prolonged service of valuable content that helps hold the interest of the readers and build a link with them.
Usually shared on a monthly basis, the theme of your newsletter can vary from tips to news, to educational content, to case studies, etc. Since your audience has given their permission to receive such emails from you, your focus as a blogger is to ensure that the readers are satisfied with the content that they are presented with.
Importance Of A Newsletter
Newsletters are permission-based promotional messages which are the greatest driver of both audience’s acquisition and retention. If you are a blogger looking to monetize your blog, newsletters are one of the most powerful strategies. Along with nurturing relationships, newsletters help build awareness of your brand and generate leads.
A part of most impressive email marketing campaigns, newsletters can bring numerous benefits to you including:
● higher response rate,
● quick and immediate communication,
● improve SEO,
● stronger customer relationships,
● cost-effective and faster compared to traditional mails, and
● an easy method to test a variety of marketing content.
An added advantage of having newsletters is that it helps to track your prospects and score their level of interest.
Email marketing campaigns focusing on newsletters are scalable; you can begin with a small list and a single message and increase the content and reach overtime. There is usually minimal risk involved in this strategy, that is why experimenting with newsletters is always recommended to find your way out and to maximize the benefits.
Purpose Of Having A Newsletter
As discussed in the above section, newsletters can be used by you to leverage the above-mentioned reasons. Newsletters are said to be giving huge returns on investments and that is why there is a huge focus on the same by bloggers and marketers these days.
For planning a newsletter campaign, it is essential to know the goal or the aim that you are trying to achieve from the same. If you do not begin with the end in mind, there are high chances of you getting lost in the journey.
The purpose of a newsletter campaign can be to:
● Increase customer engagement
● Form strong and long-term customer relationships
● Build brand identity and brand awareness
● Maximize social media followers
● Upsell/Cross-sell
● Raise ROI
● Gain loyalty
Email-list For Bloggers: As a blogger, when you create a newsletter, you own it. It provides you with a way to directly communicate with your audience and so on a more personal level. With great unique content in your newsletter and by creating an email list, you can monetize your blog and ensure that the readers come back in the future. When curating an email list, you get to handpick who you would like to reach.
People tend to receive a huge number of emails on a daily basis including spam emails, therefore it is necessary for you to have a clear aim, and create messages that stand out and grab attention.
Unless people open and read the email, any of your purposes will not be achieved. People tend to scan the lines for a few seconds to figure out what the content is about. Therefore, further in this article, we explore various steps and tips on creating effective newsletters.
Steps To Writing A Perfect Newsletter
Table of Contents
1. Define the specifics of your newsletters
2. Create valuable content
3. Insert a primary Call-to-Action
4. Add optimized images
5. Choose time to send newsletter carefully
1. Define the specifics of your newsletters
Once you have established the purpose of your newsletter strategy, it is also essential to derive the goal of your monthly newsletter. As said, the theme or the content of each newsletter can vary, and depending on that the specifics of your newsletter can also differ. Before selecting the goal, there are a few points that you need to find answers to:
● What do you want to attain from this particular newsletter?
● What are the resources you have in hand to execute this newsletter?
● What is the call-to-action that you are going to address through this newsletter?
● What section of your audience are you targeting?
● What do you want to focus on: sales or education?
As soon as you find answers to these questions, you will know what content to create and the specifics to be added in the newsletter. Aligning the answers and content will make your newsletter more readable.
2. Create valuable content
Your readers subscribe to your newsletter with an educational purpose, the chances of people showing loyalty or being a consistent reader will decrease if they only hear about sales or see regularly promotional content. While informing them about sales is necessary to monetize your blog, ensure that it is not the primary focus of your email newsletter.
Finding the right balance for your newsletter content is critical. In the initial stages, make the content 90% educational and 10% promotional. Eventually, you can change the proportion once you have an enriched email list. To begin with, sending your subscribers relevant and timely information to keep them updated is crucial.
3. Insert a primary Call-to-Action
Unlike a single blog post, a newsletter is an amalgamation of multiple pieces of content having multiple calls-to-action (CTAs). The idea here is to not give equal importance to every CTA in your newsletter.
Have only one main CTA; an important thing that you would like your subscribers to do. The other CTAs can be the options that they can follow when they find the time. A CTA could be anything from clicking through a blogpost, forwarding an email to a known person, filling a survey, etc.
4. Add optimized images
Just a well-written newsletter, will be overloading of information to the subscribers. Therefore, having good images that complement your articles make it a little more interesting. Ensure to have images that suit your content, otherwise, it would not make any sense to include them. Use good quality and high-resolution images. A trick here is to add ALT-text to your images so that even if they are not loaded the readers can read that alternative text.
You want your readers to consume the whole piece of content, therefore, keep the design simple and not too overwhelming. Have the necessary space and work on visually enriching your newsletters so that the readers have a pleasant experience while reading it.
5. Choose time to send newsletter carefully
The chances of getting your emails opened are higher if you send them at an optimal time. While the open rates do depend on the content and a catchy headline, selecting the right frame for pushing out your newsletter is crucial too.
To maximize the rates, think about your target audience and their schedules to choose the right time. Know their wake up and sleep time, their daily habits, working time, etc. If you send it at the wrong time, the chances are that they will not open it and will get piled up with other newsletters, and their likelihood of reading it gets less.
Along, with that, you should also have a proper schedule for sending your newsletters. Do not send the newsletters too often or very rarely. Sending them periodically ensures that they are not annoyed by your emails and do not end up in the spam section, or rather to make sure that they do not forget you. The aim here is to be relevant and not just create the content for the sake of it.
To sum it up, these are the final points that one should keep in mind when curating a perfect newsletter as a blogger:
● A cover diverse range of topics
● Make your newsletter have a more personal feel
● Provide value to your readers
● Offer personalized content
● Keep content relevant and updated
● Focus on a niche
● Show exclusivity
● Be simple and enriching
● Perfect your timing
To build up a loyal audience, follow the above-mentioned tips. Maximizing the impact of your newsletter will eventually in the long-term help you build authority and monetize your blog.
While grabbing and maintaining the attention of readers is difficult in today’s time when people have shorter attention spans, a newsletter with rich content and interesting details can help you make your strategy more successful. Good planning, quality content, segmented audience and the right execution time is all that you need to focus on to deliver value to your readers.
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