ARTS THREAD’s career education specialist and digital editor Jacqui Rudd’s guide to how to start a newsletter.

Newsletters are a brilliant way to build and retain relationships with customers and potential customers. An email allows you to write more in more detail than within social posts, it helps people to know, like and trust you and to let them know that you appreciate them supporting your business. Starting a newsletter can be a surprisingly effective way to promote yourself as well as being easy and cheap to produce.

But how easy is it to get right? We have created a guide to help you start a newsletter with purposeful content with your reader in mind, with tips on promoting your newsletter, what tool to utilise and how to test, analyse and improve your newsletter for optimum engagement with your reader.

What will be in your newsletter? - Your Content

To help you create each newsletter purposefully it’s helpful to start by thinking about what content you would include.

Research
A great place to start is to subscribe to newsletters of creatives similar to you or further along the journey you want to take with your career or business. Here are some questions to help you guide you through your research:

• What do you enjoy about your favourite newsletters?


• What do you like about newsletters by similar creatives to you?


• What do you not like about newsletters by similar creatives to you?


• What benefit are there for your reader in subscribing?


• How could you creatively showcase your work in the newsletter?


• How consistent would your newsletter be?


• What difference will there be between your newsletter feed and your social media feed?

Tip: I like to consider breaking newsletter content into two types, creator and curator, content you’ve created and external content you have selected to showcase on your newsletter. You can choose to do both or only one or the other but you should be building trust with your audience and credentials as a newsletter creator, curator or both.

Who is your audience? - Your Reader

Target Reader
It’s really helpful to have a target reader in mind so you are focussing on what benefits there are in subscribing to your newsletter and so they are more likely to engage with your content.

• What problem does your work solve? (Example: Jewellery that is sustainably conscious)


• What is it that your audience desires in relation to the problem you solve? (Example: They want beautiful jewellery that has been ethically and sustainably)


• How does subscribing to your newsletter meet their needs? (Example: they get VIP access to new product releases and discounts as well as a curated feed of other sustainable small business brands)

This will not only help you create focussed content but also on promoting your newsletter to the right reader.

Customer Journey Mapping
To effectively promote your newsletter is helpful to consider your readers’ journey to finding your website and newsletter and a better understanding of how your potential readers can find will help you find gaps in the customers’ journey that you haven’t considered and promote accordingly.

You can map out your ideal readers’ journey to signing up to your newsletter step by step with the template below and find any issues along the way as well as where is best to promote to get the attention of your ideal reader.

Find a free template and example customer journeys here.

Call to action
What do you want the reader to do after they’ve read your newsletter? Sending a newsletter should be purposeful and include an ask from you, whether that is a product you’d like them to buy, sharing your latest release or supporting a new campaign or crowdfunding.

How do you want to send it? - Your Tools

Choosing an email marketing platform

Mailchimp
Price: Excellent Free Version with paid premium packages.
Mailchimp is a brilliant newsletter platform not only for people starting out but is a platform that supports growth with automation options, scheduling tools and extra perks as your newsletter develops on premium paid packages.

Hubspot
Price: Free Email Marketing Tool and CRM.
Hubspot offers an easy to use, highly intuitive marketing software with customisable templates with a drag and drop method which is simple to use and edit. The extra benefit of Hubspot is their CRM tools which make customer retention and GDPR easier to manage.

Omnisend
Price: Excellent Free Version with paid premium packages.
Omnisend is an easy-to-use platform that offers brilliant automation workflows for any stage of the customer journey, which offers greater control over how and where you connect with your audience. Their basic free package offers a great service for newsletter starters and premium packages are available for further automation capabilities and more.

Check out this guide for more online productivity tools to support you.

Making sure your newsletter is professional - GDPR

Don’t be scared off doing a newsletter by GDPR, you do have to be accountable for how you use people's data but the right email marketing platform can simplify the process for you.

GDPR Tips

• - Explain how you are using peoples' information in simple language.


• - Be transparent about what information you are keeping and how you will be using it.


• - Most email marketing platforms will help you maintain accurate and up to date information for people on your lists, by remove addresses if they unsubscribe.


• - Always allow people to unsubscribe, if you use an email marketing platform, which I would recommend, you should easily be able to add an automated unsubscribe button in your emails.


• -Store their data safely and securely using a reputable platform. Do not share your subscribers’ details with anyone without their consent, that includes subscribing them to other newsletters you offer.

For more information visit the Independent Commissioners Office.

How to test, analyse and improve? - Optimise

Perfection isn’t the aim when sending a newsletter, because it’s a test, analyse and improve cycle. Searching online for the best time to send a newsletter isn’t helpful, because every audience is different, and as we learnt in 2020 a customers routine can drastically change. So what’s the best way to optimise your newsletter testing methods to improve your results, the two easiest ways are analysing what links get clicked and doing A/B testing.

Analyse links that get clicked
This is a good way of testing the engagement of your audience, if they are clicking links within your email then they have shown interest in your content. Collect all the information you can on what types of content get the most engagement, whether that is creator content and curator content and what trends you can find to optimise your newsletter for better engagement.

A/B Testing
With A/B Testing you can test sending two of the same email to your subscribers with two different subject lines and send times, to test which works best for your audience. Mailchimp, Omnisend and Hubspot all offer this service. It’s a really helpful way to quickly find your optimum send time and what subject lines have the best open rates.

Put all this knowledge back into your newsletter to improve it and keep testing and analysing for the best-engaged results.

Additional FAQ’s for Newsletters

• What is the best way to promote a newsletter? This depends on your audience but some great methods are promoting that you have a newsletter and the benefits of signing up to your social media followers. Additionally, having a pop-up on your website with a benefit for signing up to the newsletter is a nice way to give a perk to potential customers and get them to engage with you.


• How frequently should I send my newsletters? This is completely dependent on your available time and your audience. A good way to test this could be a poll on Instagram stories, directly ask your followers how often they like to receive a newsletter.


• Is consistency in frequency important? There are advantages to being consistent with your newsletters, firstly for your testing and analysing for the most accurate results, but also for building and retaining relationships with readers and customers.