How to Create a Newsletter in 7 Easy Steps (2024)

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In this post, I’m going to show you how to create a newsletter in 7 easy steps.

Let’s kick things off with a look at why newsletters are still a really important marketing tool.

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as ways of generating business right now, it’s tempting to think of the humble e-newsletter as being a bit quaint or outdated.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 (ROI) of $36 to every $1 spent on it; and Statista’s research indicates that the number of email users worldwide is set to reach 4.7 billion by 2026.

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.

So, follow our checklist below to create the best e-newsletters that you possibly can. The first step involves getting organized.

1. Organize 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.

It might even be the case that a lot of email marketing data has been captured in physical format — for example, via application forms, surveys, 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 spreadsheet before you try to send any newsletters to the contacts on them.

Next, ensure that this spreadsheet is segmented as well as possible — this means putting a field (column) in it that you can use to categorize subscribers.

For example, you could categorize your subscribers as:

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 will 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 newsletter schedule

The next step is to plan your communications very carefully. This means creating a newsletter schedule that maps out:

You can then refer to this schedule throughout the year — and ensure that you have all the necessary content ready to go well in advance of each mailout.

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 email marketing app

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 an attractive way.

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 writes all the necessary HTML code automatically in the background for you.

(Most professional email marketing tools let you edit your HTML if you like, too — but unless you have very specific design requirements, there isn’t usually a need to).

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 code bespoke e-newsletter templates.

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

5. Add your content

Once you’ve settled on a template, it’s time to add your content! Most of the major email marketing tools make it easy to do this — usually via a drag and drop editor (see screenshot below for an example of one being used to design a newsletter).

These drag and drop editors tend to be fairly user-friendly — if you’ve got experience of laying out content in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you’ll probably be fine with using one.

Here are a few tips for adding content to your newsletter:

6. Test your e-newsletters

By now you have:

…so it’s nearly time to send your newsletter!

But before you do that, it’s really important to test it carefully. And 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 perform with any newsletter you create is a simple one — make sure that it is arriving safely in inboxes (and not 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 email programs – Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo etc. — and check that it’s not being routed into a junk folder.

Now, some email marketing apps also provide you with a ‘spam score’ for any newsletters you create. As the name suggests, this indicates how likely it is that an email service provider will put your newsletter in a spam folder rather than the main inbox. You need 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 maximized — 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 smartphone one 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 hitting the send button.

(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 small sample of your data before sending it to most subscribers on your 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.

7. Measure success using email analytics

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.

Bonus email marketing tips

The above steps will help you send newsletters. But to create a great email marketing campaign, you’ll need to grow your list and communicate with your audience in smart ways.

Growing your list

To make the most of email marketing, you need to have a great (and growing!) list. Ways to do this include:

For our full set of tips for increasing your subscriber count, do check out our full guide to growing an email list, or watch the video below.

Using autoresponders

A fantastic way to send e-newsletters involves autoresponders or ‘drip’ email marketing 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, based on rules of your choosing.

For example, a subscriber could get…

…and so on.

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 behavior 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!

Follow best practice

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

Otherwise, you risk a high unsubscribe rate — or even see your email marketing app account being suspended. If you don’t respect data protection laws, legal action against you is also a possibility.

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 useful — and that you’re now in a better place to create your own fantastic email marketing campaigns!

If you’ve got any questions about email marketing? Just put them in the comments below — I’ll do my best to answer! And of course, do make sure you subscribe to our mailing list.