If you’ve decided to bump up your marketing efforts with more outreach, learning how to plan an email newsletter is a crucial step to your success. While it may be tempting to leave the planning as an afterthought and get on with other tasks, planning your newsletter will keep everything organized, on message and on schedule as the weeks and months go by.
Adding a newsletter to your marketing tools is a big and exciting step in connecting with your audience. Newsletters are by far the most effective marketing strategy, with companies and bloggers getting better responses from their most devoted fans than all of their efforts on social media or other channels.
Your reasons for your newsletter could be anything – if you run a business, you may use it to advertise your company’s products, provide an extra layer of information about your services, offer tips and tricks to lengthen the life of your products, telling fun stories related to your business, give insights into your company, and so on.
If you’re launching a newsletter for personal blogging, you can share articles, tidbits, inspiration and other quality information you think your audience would appreciate.
Read on to learn Ping’s tips for getting your newsletter off to a rocking start!
How to plan an email newsletter campaign
Planning your newsletter is a fun and creative experience where you get to decide exactly how you communicate with your audience. There are a few steps involved in order to keep things relevant, organized and on track.
Before you start diving into topics for your first newsletter, you need to do a little research and a little soul searching.
Read other newsletters for inspiration
Research your competition by becoming one of their audience. Sign up for a few newsletters to see exactly how they craft their message. Click through and see where you land, and what kind of experience you have. Is it easy to navigate? Is it well executed? Note what worked and include those strategies in your own plan, whether it’s the design, the color scheme, the fonts, the warm tone, the topics or any other element that you admire and want to include.
Develop a content strategy that displays your company’s best assets
Learning how to launch a newsletter requires a strategic approach and a solid understanding of who your audience is and what they want to hear, as well as the identity of your company. This information helps you decide on your tone, your newsletter design, and the content you offer your readers.
Take a breath, and take the time to consider your company, what you’re trying to accomplish, and the type of audience you want to build.
Identify your company, your audience and your goals
While the end goal may be to “sell more units,” your newsletter needs to offer more value to your readers than just ads. Your newsletter is a powerful tool that can educate, inform and inspire, providing much more value to your readers and ultimately to your business.
If you have an existing business plan or content strategy for your other channels, you’ve already thought about your company’s mission, identity, and goals, along with who your ideal subscriber is and what they care about. That information applies here as well. The more specific you are in defining your newsletter’s goals, the more effective you will be in reaching those goals.
Develop your content strategy
- Note your company’s strengths, existing products and services, and overall identity in terms of colors, fonts, logos, and voice, tone and message.
- Confirm, either through sales history or data, who your target audience is and where you can find them online.
- Define your goals for your newsletters. These might include getting a certain percentage of clicks to your website, or a certain number of sales. It may be to get eyes on your blog, or more signups on your social media accounts. Whatever your goals are, they will help to keep you focused, will inform your topics, and will ultimately help you become successful with your newsletters.
Once you have that information at the forefront of your mind and organized for reference, you can begin to plan when to send your newsletters, how often to send them and what to include in each one.
Content calendars for newsletters
Each newsletter will typically reflect 3 – 4 stories with links back to your website. This gives you 3 – 4 opportunities to share relevant information in each newsletter you send out. It also creates a lot of entries over time that need to be organized by subject, date sent and other criteria. Using a content calendar is a great way to stay efficient and organized as the volume of your information grows.
At Ping, we use content calendars for everything we plan, whether it’s blogging, social media or newsletter campaigns. Your content calendar can be planned on a simple doc, on a spreadsheet, on a calendar app or in a CRM like Monday.com. They all work, depending on what works best for you.
For this article, we’ll show you how to use a spreadsheet for your content calendar. The strength of a spreadsheet is that you can sort it by topic, by date or by category, and you can upload it to a more sophisticated program like a CRM. This makes planning easy!
Steps to get started with a content calendar
Open a new spreadsheet, name it Newsletter Content Calendar, and create these headings for columns:
- Topic: this is where you’ll put all of your brainstormed ideas, no matter how trivial or crazy.
- Status: easily sort by this column to know what’s done and still pending.
- Pillar: this is where you’ll note the overall category these ideas fall under.
- Due date: this is the date all of the work should be done on the newsletter, including test runs, checking that links are correct and so on. It’s a good idea to put your due date at least a week before your send date. This alleviates stress!
- Posting date: this is the date your newsletter will be sent out.
You can drill your content calendar down further by adding more columns, like:
- Products: list the products that this topic relates to (i.e., if you’re writing about camping with a tent that you sell, the product would be that tent.
- Audience segment: list the portion of the audience this topic relates to (i.e., if you’re writing about summer camps, the audience would be kids). It’s a nice way to sort and make sure you’re appealing to everyone.
- Channel: use this if you want to expand your content calendar to include social media posts, blog posts and other channels.
Choosing your topics
Choose 1 – 4 content pillars to get started.
Pillars are like the tent poles of your content. They’re the main subjects that topics fall under. For example, if you sell tools, then Hand Tools might be one of your pillars, with topics like Wrenches, Screwdrivers and Hammers under that pillar.
Under each pillar, list as many topics as you like.
No ideas are bad ideas at this point, so enter in all of the topics that you’re thinking of using. Deciding which topics to hone in on may come easily or it may be challenging, depending on your business.
You can look in the following places for ideas for topics:
- Your existing products and services
- Company news
- Related community events
- Helpful tips related to your products or services
- Testimonials from clients
- Links to informative and helpful blog articles
- Your competitors
Now, you can start to assign dates to these topics. For your first newsletter, aim for 3 – 4 topics.
Need more ideas? Look to your blog.
An easy way to connect detailed, longer form content to your newsletter is through a blog. If you already have one, you’ve already got great content to use for your first few newsletters. If you don’t have a blog yet, consider its value as a marketing tool to draw in more potential customers through the power of SEO keywords and valuable content.
Creating blog posts that are relevant to your audience lures them right where you want them – on your website, reading your content, clicking on your links and ultimately ordering your products or services.
A blog is a great way to express your knowledge of your industry, to clarify what your products do or what your services include, and can give your audience a peek behind the curtain into how your business functions.
A blog also gives you a huge opportunity to include and rank for keywords. By creating blog posts, you’re populating your website with relevant information that will rank you higher in search results.
If you focus on “evergreen” content (blog posts that aren’t tied to current events), your blog can serve as a perpetual source of information, inspiration and trust for your audience.
SEO for more ideas and guidance
Even though newsletters are emailed to a closed circle of contacts, SEO keyword research can reveal current trends in an industry or topic, and is a great way to get insights into what matters most to people.
In addition to using tools like SEMRush, Moz, ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner, you can simply google your keyword and see what comes up. Scroll down to the bottom and look at search suggestions, and people also asked sections.
Check out competitors in your industry or topic, and look at what keyword they’re using.
Choosing a newsletter frequency
You can send your newsletter out as often as you like, but you need to consider a couple of factors:
How often does your audience want to hear from you?
You never want to turn off readers by bombarding them with too many emails. And the frequency will depend entirely on your subject matter and your audience. If you write a blog offering daily stock tips or motivation for diet and health, a daily morning newsletter would be appropriate. But if you run a business or blog that doesn’t involve a daily check-in, purchase or need, then once a week, bi-weekly or monthly will be more welcomed by your readers.
How much time, energy and resources do you have?
Be clear about how much time you have to put into creating your newsletter content, launching your newsletters and following up with tasks like list management and analytics. It may be easier for you to start with a monthly newsletter and become more frequent over time.