Effective advertising almost always includes a robust email marketing strategy, regardless of the type of business. Emails are somewhat inexpensive to produce yet reach a wide audience in a quick and efficient way. Using email, you can communicate the latest developments from your company, announce a limited-time offer or share your latest blog content.
Email newsletters are one of the most common email marketing tools, providing a “one-stop-shop” approach to increasing engagement and conversion. In this guide, we’ll explain the benefits of email newsletters and how to craft an effective campaign so you can take your marketing efforts to the next level.
What is an email newsletter?
An email newsletter is a communication sent on a regular basis that is intended to nurture contacts in an interactive way. They let subscribers know what’s new and exciting while simultaneously inviting them to engage with your company. Newsletters should not be overly salesy, as that may alienate your audience. Consider them as a form of “advertainment” – content that should inform consumers about products and services in a fun, approachable way.
Newsletters should provide added value for recipients by offering relevant information and deals. Try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes: What would you want to know about your company or the industry you are in? For example, if your business sells electronics, featuring exciting news about new innovations may pique readers’ interest, thereby increasing the likelihood that they’ll read further (and open future communications from you).
Why do businesses send email newsletters?
There are several benefits you can gain by deploying an email newsletter strategy. First, consistent communications help ensure that companies stay relevant with their subscribers while building rapport. Second, it’s a great way to boost website traffic via embedded links to your web content – and, of course, a third benefit of email newsletters is that they help you generate sales.
A fourth benefit of sending email newsletters is the relatively low cost associated with production. Aside from labor costs and a subscription fee for an email marketing service, email newsletters are still less expensive than other advertising methods, such as print or pay-per-click. And with the average American checking their email inbox multiple times throughout the day, you have a higher chance of engaging with your target audience.
A fifth benefit of email newsletters is that they provide metrics, which are useful for digital marketing teams to analyze to improve future campaigns. Open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates are key performance indicators and can provide insight into how subscribers interact with your content. These email analytics are powerful tools, so they should be reviewed regularly to help you increase conversions.
How to create an email newsletter
Crafting an engaging yet informative email newsletter doesn’t have to be difficult. The steps below outline how to create and send a newsletter.
- Choose which email marketing service you’d like to use. Email marketing services provide a one-stop-shop solution perfect for businesses big and small. The software is easy to learn and use, plus you get several templates you can easily customize to create your newsletter. They will also help you keep track of whom you’re communicating with and how your messages are performing. Some of the most widely used options include Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Constant Contact, and GetResponse.
- Curate a contact list. An email list contains the contact information of people who have consented to receive communications from you. There are many creative ways to grow your email list numbers, but one thing to avoid is buying a list, as they almost always contain outdated information and have spam traps buried inside them.
- Provide segmentation. Having a robust list of subscribers is a great start, but understanding who they are can lead to even better results. Segmentation is the act of grouping contacts together based on certain criteria. It may be demographics-based, such as location or age, or it can relate more to purchase history or self-identified interests.
- Determine the target and your objectives. Now that you have selected an email marketing service and segmented your list, you can plan your newsletter. First, start by setting your goals and objectives for your newsletter – are you trying to push recipients toward a certain webpage? What metrics will you use as your key performance indicators? Outlining what you want to achieve with your newsletter prior to designing it can streamline the process and boost the effectiveness of your messaging.
- Build your newsletter content. With your objectives in mind, you can now move to the next step in the process: planning what information you will include in your newsletter. If you are starting your newsletter from scratch, you may want to pick some regular features that will appear in subsequent newsletters. This could include a featured blog, a quiz, and/or the latest news. Make sure to include plenty of links to your website and social media accounts, offering multiple chances for the recipient to interact. Strong calls-to-action (CTAs) within linked buttons or boxes also bode well for engagement. Most businesses send their newsletter to all of the subscribers on their email list, but you may want to tweak the content of your newsletter slightly depending on different segments of your audience. Once you’ve added your images and proofread your newsletter thoroughly, it’s ready to go!
- Schedule your send. Deciding when to send your email newsletter is a crucial part of your strategy. Several surveys have been conducted on the best time to send marketing communications, and it has been determined that in most cases, the earlier part of the traditional workday (between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.) has the best chance for engagement. As far as the best day of the week, Tuesdays and Thursdays have been identified as top performers, especially if they fall on the fifth, seventh, or 12th day of the month.
- Analyze the results. Email newsletters provide important metrics that should be evaluated carefully to determine successes and identify areas for improvement. Which parts of the newsletter did consumers click on the most? Were there deliverability issues? Which of your segments engaged the least? All of these questions should influence future campaign planning. Your team should consider using A/B testing (wherein slightly different versions of the same email are sent at the same time) to further understand audience behavior and preferences. Many email marketing services offer A/B testing with their service.
The best free email marketing services in 2023
Best free email marketing service for growing email marketing programs
Mailchimp
One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding, Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program if you’re planning to scale it quickly. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing—all in its free plan.
An approachable editor that includes helpful tips and best practices along the way makes Mailchimp an accessible option for both new and experienced email marketers. For example, when setting up a subject line, a sidebar reminds you about recommended character length, emoji use in subject lines, and more.
Once you’re ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you’ll never have to switch to another app.
Best free email marketing software for segmentation
HubSpot
HubSpot has everything you need under one roof. The email marketing features are well-rounded and offer a lot for free: up to 2,000 emails per month, over 100 lists, and reporting. When you’re ready to scale, you can add additional HubSpot tools for CRM, full marketing automation, customer service, sales, and more.
The email tool throws you into the editor as soon as signup is finished, so you can get moving quickly. For those new to HubSpot or email marketing more broadly, the next stop is the user guide, detailing everything you need to know to build beautiful, effective campaigns in HubSpot.
Included in your 105 lists are 100 static and 5 “active” lists, which include super quick options to segment, say, hard-bouncers or recipients who open but don’t click.
Best free email marketing software for advanced email marketers
MailerLite
MailerLite doesn’t offer pre-made templates for its free newsletter service, but the dynamic, pre-designed content blocks more than make up for the lack of templates. With blocks for highlighting multiple articles, videos, RSS lists, products, apps, events, and more, MailerLite helps experienced email marketers make quick work of building new campaigns and custom templates.
Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There’s a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It’s a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.
Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows. You can create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.
Best free email marketing tool for eCommerce businesses
Omnisend
Omnisend is the best free email marketing tool I found for eCommerce businesses. The free plan is fairly limited on subscribers and monthly sends, but it includes access to nearly every feature the platform offers—all of which are thoroughly built for eCommerce. Once you connect your online store to Omnisend, the (email marketing) world is your oyster.
The app offers a number of behavioral segmentation dimensions based on store activity and shopping behavior, as well as pre-defined customer segments like high-potential buyers, visitors to a particular product, and more.
Navigate to the automation section to browse a number of pre-built automation workflows organized by type (e.g., welcome series, cart abandonment) or goal (e.g., convert subscribers, cross-sell, build loyalty).
When you’re ready to design emails, head to the drag-and-drop editor, where you can start from a number of eCommerce-focused templates or quickly build your own templates with quick-add blocks for product listing, discounts, product recommendations, and more. Omnisend also supports SMS and push campaigns, in addition to email, with A/B testing features for all of the above.
Best email marketing tool for free email automation
Sendinblue
The more you use your email marketing tool, the more you’ll need to rely on automation. It’s hard to come across truly free marketing automation software, but Sendinblue offers a variety of templated automation flows, based on your goals. You can choose your workflow to improve engagement, increase traffic, grow revenue, or build relationships.
Even with this kind of advanced automation, you can get from account setup to actually editing emails in just a few clicks. Once you’re there, you can build your emails with dozens of pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Then, either send them as email newsletters or use Sendinblue’s automation workflows to send them on a schedule.
You can’t send as many emails at once as you can from other free email marketing tools, but you can manage more contacts and split them into focused lists. Sendinblue also lets you buy pre-paid credits to send more than your daily email limit.
Best free email marketing software with an affordable upgrade
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns’ free plan isn’t as hyper-generous as it once was, but it’s still a great starting point you can scale from. You get 2,000 contacts, 6,000 sends per month, and 5 users. The free plan also offers robust audience segmentation and features for social and SMS campaigns.
The drag-and-drop editor works how you expect and includes support for dynamic content blocks. You can even personalize dynamic blocks based on your customer segments.
When it comes to automation, you’ll choose from autoresponders (one-email triggered sequences) or fully automated workflows. Both are available to build and map out on the free plan and include several workflow templates to help you build out automations faster. When you create a workflow, you can choose from templates for welcome and onboarding, nurture series, re-engagement, customer retention, eCommerce, and conditional workflows.
When you’re ready to activate automated flows, segment your audience, or grow beyond the subscriber and send limits on the free plan, Zoho offers the most affordable upgrade to a paid plan for as little as $3 per month.
