This Is How To Write a Great Newsletter
10 of the best tips for crafting successful email newsletters

Email is one of the most effective tools for marketers and writers. Newsletters are one of the most common types of emails, but they can be hard to get right. To harness the power of email marketing, it’s important to understand how to write an email newsletter correctly.
Your newsletter is a valuable marketing resource that needs your attention, focus, and energy. Just sending a newsletter for the sake of sending a newsletter will not earn trust, which is critical to your newsletter’s success.
You also need to know the best practices and what you should think about when you are creating your weekly or monthly newsletter. Here are ten tips for creating a new email newsletter or rejuvenating an old one.
1. Establish Your Goals
Before you start anything new, it’s important to start with your goals. What do you want to accomplish with your newsletter? Your goals could be:
- Drive more sales
- Expand your social media presence
- Increase eBook downloads
- Grow subscriptions to your online course
- Drive more traffic to a specific landing page
- Promote your new products and services
- Increase brand awareness
- Stay top of mind with your customers and prospects
If you don’t know your goals, how will subscribers to your newsletter know what to do? Identify your top three goals and stick with them. They may change over the course of the newsletter, but it’s important to have a “north star” for your newsletter.
2. Determine Your Audience
It’s important that you know the audience of your email newsletter. Who’s it going to? Your customers or your prospects or both? The last thing you want to do is send out a newsletter that your audience won’t be interested in.
Your audience doesn’t really care about your products and services. They only really care about how your products and services can help them with their lives and problems. Ask yourself, “If I received this email newsletter, would I care?”
Your audience should look forward to receiving the newsletter because it adds value. Your audience should be passionate about it so they encourage their family, friends, and colleagues to subscribe. You don’t want them to become disinterested, ignore or delete it, or unsubscribe.
3. Pick Your Format
One of the most important parts of your newsletter is picking your format. It will make or break your publication. The format should align with your goals and your audience.
Whatever format you choose, your email newsletter format should be short and focused. The format should be consistent from issue to issue.
Here are some of your options:
- Lists, headlines, and longer blurbs
- Headlines with short blurbs
- Bulleted lists
- Single stories
The first two are some of the most popular formats, according to a Nielsen Norman Group usability study. They may use a roundup style or take a more journalistic approach.
The headlines with short blurbs format is the most favored. The format covers five or more topics or articles with a concise headline, has blurbs ranging from two to four sentences, and contains a link to the full story. Bullet lists and single-story newsletters are good for promoting upcoming events, discounts, and specials.
4. Decide on the Type of Content
Newsletters need to be more than glorified advertisements. Your content needs to be short, simple, and focused.
Create a theme for each issue of your email newsletter. Subscribers don’t want too much information or content on too many topics. They don’t want to look at something that is cluttered.
It’s important that you don’t include more than two full-length stories in your newsletter. Keep your stories tight. Summarize them and then pique your audience’s curiosity to click through to the full article.
5. Make Sure You Are on Brand
People unsubscribe from emails if they think the content is not relevant, so it’s up to you to stay on brand and on topic at all times. For example, if your business is about manufacturing, don’t talk about local weather or politics. If it’s irrelevant to your brand, it’s irrelevant to your subscribers.
Your email subscribers have your brand pictured in their head and you need to validate that impression. Your newsletter is a great place to do that. Email is the best way to earn their trust quickly and cultivate a deeper relationship with them.
Create a nicely designed email template that you can use regularly. This template will save time and ensure your email newsletter layout is consistent with your company’s brand guidelines. If your company has an editorial style guide, make sure the editorial voice of your email newsletter fits within those requirements.
It’s a good rule of thumb to stay away from controversial topics in your newsletter and avoid talking about sex, politics, and religion unless your business is in one of those areas.
6. Stay on Schedule
Consistency is critical for a successful newsletter. Your audience expects to hear from you regularly. It’s important to live up to what you promised in the introduction of your first issue.
If they signed up for a weekly newsletter, you should set expectations with them so they will get it on the same day and time every week. If they signed up for a monthly newsletter, it’s important they only get one newsletter during the first or last week of the month. Make it like appointment-viewing TV — the old-fashioned way you used to watch TV when you knew what day and time your favorite TV show would air.
“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.”
—Actor and former professional wrestler Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. “The Rock”
If you are not consistent, your subscribers will lose interest, which can damage your brand. Also, if you promised a monthly newsletter and you send three emails to them this month, they won’t be happy.
7. Concentrate on Your Subject Line
It’s important to write tantalizing subject lines. Your email newsletter will only be opened when you have an attention-grabbing email subject line. You should A/B test subject lines so you can find out what works for your audience. You can’t convert your call to action in your email newsletter if nobody opens it.
Your subject line makes or breaks the success of your email newsletter. It’s tougher to write short and pithy messages than long-winded ones.
Also, be personal. Research shows that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. The best way to personalize your emails is by adding the recipient’s first name in the subject line. Research also shows that time-sensitive words like “important,” “alert,” and “urgent” in the subject line also work.
The next time you draft an email message, understand the key ingredients of a great email subject line. For example, avoid spammy words and phrases like “free,” “act now,” and “limited time.” More than 300 billion emails are sent every day. Your subscribers get a lot of emails so they need to quickly determine which ones to open and which ones to trash.
8. Balance Information With Promotion
After the subject line, your introduction is the most important part. To connect with your readers, you need to provide value quickly.
Why should they read your newsletter when they could be doing something else? Time is money! Break up your text into short and digestible paragraphs so it’s easy to consume.
Your subscribers don’t want to hear about your products and services all the time. Balance your newsletter with a ratio of 80% educational content and 20% promotional content.
Keep your beginning section short and don’t overload your reader with a lot of information. Use the inverted pyramid approach where the most important information is first. The who, what, when, where, and why appear at the start with supporting details presented towards the end.
The point of most newsletters is to warm up your readers so they advance through the sales process. You are helping them with educational, entertaining, and informative content while not trying to sell them right away. Build influence first before you sell.
9. Measure, Measure, Measure
The best way to find out if your newsletter is working is to use analytics to measure your success. Whatever email marketing software you use, there should be analytical tools available. Look at your open rates, bounce rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes.
It’s important to try to measure as much as you can with your email newsletters. If you have more than one newsletter, find out which one is performing the best. To be successful, it’s important to concentrate on your strengths instead of your weaknesses.
Tracking your email newsletter metrics helps you form future issues. It’s important to determine the right metrics for you to measure. Start with bounce rate or the percentage of emails that were delivered and then move to delivery rate or how many emails were delivered to the recipient’s email inbox.
Eventually, you will be able to measure revenue per email, sharing rate, and list growth rate. These measurements are important to tie your email marketing to your business performance. The more you can tie marketing activities to the business, the better.
10. Create a Strong Call to Action (CTA)
People remember the beginning and end of your content. Your closing is one of the most important parts of your email newsletter.
What do you want your readers to do next? You should have one thing you would like your subscribers to take action on. Focus on one CTA but if you have others, they should be if-you-have-time options.
Your content should inspire, so subscribers want to take that action. Maybe you want them to read the entire story, visit a special landing page, sign up for an online course, download an eBook, or buy your product or service. Your call to action needs to be crystal clear or your readers won’t take action.
Spell out exactly what you want them to do next. There should be no guessing involved, and it should be super simple and easy to do. It’s your responsibility to guide them to the next part of the journey.
If your call to action is compelling and clear, your readers will take action. Remember: your email newsletter is only as strong as your CTA.
Bringing It All Together
Email newsletters are one of the most effective marketing tactics. Email works, but it needs to be tied to your bigger marketing strategy. To produce results, you need to understand your readers and help them.
If you follow these tips, you’ll create a better newsletter.
- Establish your goals
- Determine your audience
- Pick your format
- Decide the type of content
- Make sure you are on-brand
- Stay on schedule
- Concentrate on your subject line
- Balance information with promotion
- Measure, measure, measure
- Create a strong call to action (CTA)
If you set up your email newsletter correctly, you’ll see higher conversion rates, grow your subscriber base, and take advantage of this powerful digital marketing channel.





