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There is no perfect time to start an email newsletter, but expanding your email marketing strategy can accelerate your brand’s growth. While sending your audience email marketing campaigns about sales, new products, and blog posts is a great way to stay present in their inboxes, creating an email newsletter can foster brand loyalty, grow your email lists, and give you new insights into your customers.
Read on to decide whether a newsletter is the right move for your business, and learn how to use Email Campaigns to start a newsletter in six steps.
The advantages of an email newsletter
A high-quality newsletter is a valuable digital marketing tool for a small business or brand because newsletter content is more conversational by nature. That more human touch allows you to build relationships with your email subscribers, which will help you grow your audience and brand identity.
1. Build your audience
If you already have a blog, an email newsletter can help you grow your audience and increase website traffic. Encourage readers to subscribe, then send regular newsletter campaigns that showcase recent articles and link back to your website for the full piece. This ensures your existing readers don’t miss any updates, increasing visits to your website and sharing of your content.
2. Build loyalty
If you don’t have a blog, don’t stress—it’s not a requirement in order to launch a newsletter. Any type of content can be a starting point for a professional newsletter. You might curate a roundup of interesting links you've found valuable or compile a bulleted list of recent news items or accomplishments you wanted to share.
Some business owners might even find it easier to send a quick personal note to their mailing list about what they're up to, rather than writing a formal blog, because it's less time-intensive. All of these communications add value to your brand by building connections with your customers and encouraging loyalty to your brand.
3. Diversify your marketing
Many brands and businesses want to promote their products and new website additions, but don't want to come across as too sales-heavy. The format of an email newsletter lends itself to a softer promotional touch. For example, a business might send a monthly customer newsletter featuring a brief introductory message—around one or two paragraphs—and follow that up with a showcase of upcoming product launches, website articles, or special offers.
Is creating an email newsletter right for your business?
Start by asking yourself if you already have content you’d like to share with your audience. This can include original content from your website, blog, or social media channels. This way, you’re connecting your audience with tailored content that interests them—and building your brand presence in the process.
If you don’t currently have shareable content or your time is devoted to scaling other aspects of your business, it might make sense to focus your email marketing on individual updates, like announcing a new flavor available at your candy company, promoting a limited edition print of your artwork, or encouraging signups for a newly launched online workshop.
How to make your first newsletter
If you’ve decided to create your first newsletter, follow these six steps to complete your first send.
1. Identify the goals of your newsletter
Is your primary goal to drive website engagement? Develop a readership for a new blog? Will you measure your success based on conversions (i.e., sales or email opt-ins), or click-through rate (the number of people who click through to your website)?
Your goals will inform everything from the content you include to the cadence of your sends. In the bigger picture, having multiple goals is a good thing—and might mean creating multiple targeted newsletters—but for your first send, try to focus on a single, measurable goal. This will help you optimize your efforts and make clear decisions as you build your first newsletter.
2. Build your mailing list
The number of email addresses you should aim to capture for your mailing list will vary based on the size of your existing audience. No subscriber list size is too small to get started. Add a sign-up form to your website or blog, and share a link with friends and colleagues. If you’re building your list from scratch, set a goal to capture a specific number of subscriber emails for your first send. You can always adjust your goal as you start to capture emails and scale your brand.
Your newsletter can also be a great tool to build your mailing list. On your first send, encourage readers to forward the newsletter and share with their network and promote it on your own social media channels. If you have an engaged social media following, you might set a goal relative to your audience, like converting 5% of your social media followers into newsletter subscribers.
You can start collecting subscribers on Squarespace with a Newsletter block, a promotional pop-up, or by adding a newsletter subscription option at checkout in your online store. When you connect Email Campaigns as your storage option, subscribers collected on your website will be stored in your mailing list, making it easy to streamline your newsletter sends with our email marketing tools.
3. Develop a content strategy and cadence
With your goals and mailing lists scoped out, start selecting the content you’d like to include in your newsletter, and think about when it makes sense to send it. Will you be speaking primarily to freelancers or 9-to-5ers? Consider what you already know about your audience, and test your send dates and times based on that information. Biweekly, monthly, and even quarterly newsletters help build your relationship with your audience, so consider your own bandwidth when deciding the frequency of your sends.
With Email Campaigns, you can split your email list into separate groups to do manual A/B testing on send times. That is, you could send the same email at different times of day to track the open rate. You can do similar testing for email subject lines.
Depending on your cadence, you can feature blog posts, photography, information about upcoming classes or events, or a behind-the-scenes look at your business. Settle on a few regular updates you’d like to include in every send—this way, you won’t be creating every newsletter from scratch.
4. Customize your newsletter design
Your email newsletter is an extension of your brand—make sure you choose colors, fonts, and a layout that reflect your visual identity. A consistent aesthetic will help customers recognize your brand and save you time on designing your newsletter with each send.
With Email Campaigns, you can customize a template and reuse the draft for every send. Choose an email template, add custom colors and fonts, adjust the format, and map out how you’d like text, images, and call-to-action (CTA) buttons to appear. Revisit the goals you outlined in Step 1 to ensure your design and functionality supports them. For example, if the main goal of your newsletter is to drive blog readership, be sure to feature your most recent blog post and link to your blog in multiple places.
5. Create your content
Now that you’ve customized your newsletter template, you can start populating it with content. Reference best practices for your email campaign to enhance your newsletter performance, and follow these quick tips to make your first send a success:
Customize your sender name and address. With Email Campaigns, set up your Sender Details with a specific email address and Sender Name. Spam filters are less likely to reject emails sent from a custom email address, and a customized Sender Name will make it clear to recipients who the message is from.
Write an eye-catching subject line. Be direct and to the point—longer subject lines will be clipped by most email service providers, especially on mobile devices.
Add images to engage readers, and save each image with a clear, descriptive title. The title will become the alt text, which shows up if an image doesn’t load or is being parsed by a screen reader.
Use clear CTAs, and ensure your call-to-action buttons have direct links. If you want readers to purchase a specific new product, your CTA button should link directly to that product’s landing page, rather than to your ecommerce store’s homepage.
6. Hit send and measure your success
Track your newsletter’s performance with every send, and adjust your strategy based on past performance. If your open rate isn’t optimal, experiment with different subject lines until you reach your open rate goal. If your click-through rate is low or your unsubscribe rate is too high, try different pieces of content, alternative call-to-action language, or a refreshed layout.
The Email Campaigns dashboard includes analytics for each campaign, where you can track opens, clicks, and other key metrics to evaluate your newsletter’s performance.
Ready to launch your newsletter? Get started with Email Campaigns.
This post was updated on January 23, 2023.