What Is a Business Newsletter? Your Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Perfect Newsletters
What is a business newsletter? How do I know what my email list wants to read about? How do I create a newsletter they will read? These are all questions we ask ourselves the first time we sit down to write a newsletter to send to our subscriber list.
Creating a newsletter is an essential task for your business. In this blog post, we’ll teach you how to write compelling, engaging, and noteworthy business newsletters to capture the attention of your subscribers and make them want to read what you’ve sent them.
Let’s get started …
What Is a Business Newsletter?
A business newsletter is an email that a company sends to the subscribers of their email list that can include engaging content, product and feature announcements, promotions, deals, advice, new and exciting published blog posts, and more.
With the right business newsletter, you can communicate with your target audience about solutions that your product or service solves, tips for overcoming obstacles, and how to use new products or work with new features.
The goal is to strengthen the relationships with your subscribers.
What Should Be Included in a Business Newsletter?
Your business newsletter can be many include things: your blog’s latest content, upcoming product updates or launches, event announcements, or deals and promotions that are currently running. What you decide to include in your newsletter depends on your intent for the specific newsletter. Is it to get more traffic to your site? To promote a new product or service? To update your subscribers on company news? Let the goal of the newsletter guide your content.
Here is a list of content ideas that you could include:
- Useful Resources – PDFs, ebooks, checklists, templates, swipe files, and resource lists all make valuable content for your business newsletter that could help subscribers and keep them anticipating your next email.
- Expert Tips and Tricks – Offer tips on how to solve a problem, how to interact with product features, and how to save time or money.
- Upcoming Events or Event Recaps – Two easy ways to add value to your business newsletter are informing your subscribers about an upcoming event or recapping one that ended.
- Product Launches / New Features – Announcing new product launches or features will help with engagement, customer retention, and conversions, especially if you already have prospects thinking about buying your product.
- Referral Program Announcements/Invites – Referral program announcements and invites add value to your newsletter by getting your subscribers and previous customers excited and interested.
- Customer Stories and Reviews – Adding customer stories or reviews about your products or services is a great way to engage new prospects and assure them that your product or service has value.
- How-To Articles/Tutorials – How-to articles and tutorials are perfect for showing your prospects how to use your product. Including helpful content in your business newsletter will increase your conversions by helping more people understand how to work with your product or services.
- Social Media Contests and Giveaways – Social media contests and giveaways make some of the most attention-grabbing subjects for your business newsletter. Who doesn’t like to win stuff, right?
- Polls or Surveys – Polls and surveys are a great way to interact with customers, get people to engage with your brand, and gain insights on how to better interact with your clients.
- Promo or Coupon Codes – Promo codes and coupons make great announcements because everyone likes to save money. Promos have a higher engagement rate than just basic content because they are a chance to save money. These discounts can help an undecided customer make the purchase.
How Do I Write a Business Newsletter?
That’s another good question. If you want to write the perfect business newsletter for your subscribers, it starts with understanding of who they are, their day-to-day struggles, their hopes and ambitions, and how they interact with your brand.
Once you have your ideal prospects in clear perspective and you can answer these questions, coming up with the perfect business newsletter is as easy as following some basic rules, avoiding some common mistakes, and brainstorming for the ideal angle to get your subscribers to react.
Here is how to write an effective business newsletter:
Come Up with a Short and Enticing Title
Titles are one of the essential parts of your newsletter. You want to be creative and exciting without being too long, artificial, or punchy. Something straightforward and helpful works best.
Include a Call to Action
Including a strong call to action at the end of your email will ensure that your subscribers are engaging with your brand. It helps a business gather info on the customers’ interests when they sign up, click to find out more, and click to go buy a product, or take whatever action you want them to take.
Write Interesting and Valuable Content
If you want to keep your subscribers interested in your business newsletter, you have to create content that is valuable to them. This means considering what they want to read and providing relevant and helpful information.
Adding images, infographics, and videos can also spice up your content. To get started, consider the topics your subscribers will find interesting. What are they asking questions about? What do they struggle with? What are their interests?
Once you know what your subscribers are curious about, you can start developing content around those topics and work on creating a business newsletter that they can’t resist.
You can also use social media to find ideas for content. Monitor the conversations on Twitter and Facebook, and see which topics people are talking about the most. Then, create articles or blog posts about similar topics.
Personalize Your Emails for a Better Open Rate
Did you know that business newsletters have an average open rate across all industries of 29.55%? It’s true. But there are ways to improve your tactics to keep open rates as high as possible. One way is to personalize your newsletters.
When you send a personalized email, subscribers are more likely to open it and read what you have to say because it sounds like you are talking directly to them. You can personalize your emails by using the subscriber’s name or by including specific information in the subject line.
Keep It Short and to the Point
While the content of your email is essential, if your subscribers don’t open it, they won’t ever see your message. That’s why it’s critical to spend time crafting a catchy and relevant subject line that entices them to open it.
Keep your subject lines short and sweet – no more than 50 characters if possible. Keeping your subject lines succinct and enticing will ensure that they are easily visible in your subscriber’s inbox and also display with no problem on a mobile device. You can also test different subject lines to see which ones get the best response rates as time goes on.
Write a Rough Draft
By writing a rough draft of your business newsletter first, you can focus on getting your ideas down on paper without worrying about the details. Then, after you have your final draft in mind, you can revise your work to ensure it’s perfect before you send it out.
Send to Your List
Now all you need to do is pick the perfect time to send out your newsletter, and choose how you will deliver it to them. There are plenty of tools online like SendInBlue that you can use to monitor open rate and engagement rates as you get used to writing business newsletters and test out different methods and styles until you feel like a pro.
Do Newsletters Increase Sales?
The hard part is creating effective newsletters. Finding the right strategy to keep your audience interested without over-familiarizing them with your brand is critical to engagement and business growth.
It’s the difference between making them unsubscribe or getting them to anticipate the next one. In short, newsletters can sell, but you need to know when and how to optimize your emails for the best results. Check out this post on how to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns to learn more.
Conclusion
A business newsletter is critical to every business owner’s marketing strategy. It can be a brief update of all the top newsworthy items you feature on your company blog and a snapshot of your brand for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention. Your subscribers will be more engaged if you personalize your emails, keep enticing titles, and make them interesting and insightful.
You can create a professional business newsletter for your subscriber list with practice and careful deliberation.
However, if you decide that you don’t have enough resources in house to create newsletters, then you can work with a company like ContentWriters. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, or are interested in one of our Self Service or Managed Services content plans, click here to get in touch with us, and we will connect with you as quickly as possible.
Eric has been writing web copy across a multitude of niches for over 8 years, including finance, tech, real estate and hardware. He prides himself in his meticulous research prior to writing to provide audiences with the most informative pieces.
