There are many strategies and practices to keep in mind when writing a newsletter. Here are five ideas that you should consider when starting or updating your newsletter.

Provide Value to your Audience

"In your email newsletters, get rid of the self-promotion (most of the time) and focus on sending your subscribers educational, relevant, timely information. Unless you actually have an exciting, big piece of news about your product, service, or company, leave out the promotional parts."

Ginny Mineo, How to Create an Email Newsletter People Actually Read

The goal of a newsletter is to keep your brand top of mind. A newsletter accomplishes this by creating trust and establishing yourself as someone who cares about their audience and wants to provide value to them. In other words, you’re attempting to build a relationship with your customers beyond the transactional business-to-customer relationship.

Imagine you have a client who just finished paying and receiving your services. In a follow-up email, you let them know you have a newsletter that they can subscribe to. They decide to subscribe, and are immediately bombarded with sales offers every day. Eventually they unsubscribe just to get away from it.

Now imagine a different scenario, where they subscribe to your newsletter. This time, they get an email once or twice a month, and it’s packed full of useful tips and tricks. Occasionally you send them a sales offer, and they take you up on it. While setting up your services with them, they mention that they wanted to follow all of the tips and tricks you mentioned in your newsletter, but saw your sale and decided that to take you up on it since they don’t have much time to do it themselves.

These are two very different examples, the first one being on the extreme end. But hopefully they illustrate why you should prioritize providing value in your newsletters. The first customer is probably never going to buy from that company because of the annoying marketing. The second customer will, because they trust the brand behind the services. They now are in a prime position not only to utilize the services, but recommend them to others. You’ve established that you care about your customers, and that you’re here to help them succeed.

Be Clear and Purposeful

When your customers subscribe to your newsletter, you should be up front about what they will be receiving in their inbox and how often they’ll be getting an email from you. By being clear right from the get-go, you are demonstrating empathy and honesty. In his book Building a StoryBrand, Donald Miller says, “In business, if we don’t communicate clearly, we shrink.”

Your newsletter should also have a clear and concise purpose behind it. Try to start with one niche, one interest, and see how it does. An example of this would be a pest control company sharing seasonal tips for taking care of pests. It’s helpful information, and one that they can follow up with a sales offer. In this example, the purpose is to have 90% educational content, and 10% sales content. Customers who subscribe to this newsletter would expect a quarterly email that has that ratio of content. If they get an email every week about a different kind of bug to watch out for in their home, they might unsubscribe because that isn’t what they signed up for.

To sum up, your website’s subscription page (or wherever your customers can subscribe to your newsletter) should have the following information:

• Overview of contents of the newsletter

• How often they’ll get the newsletter

You should also include a sentence on how they can unsubscribe at any time. We’ll talk more about unsubscribing below.

Maintain an Active Audience

One of the critical components of a successful newsletter is maintaining an active, hopefully engaged audience. There are several things you need to do to achieve this, one of which is including an unsubscribe link at the bottom of ALL of your emails. If you send a business email, it needs to include an unsubscribe link.

Does that seem counterintuitive? Why would you want anyone to unsubscribe? Well, you don't want the active members to unsubscribe, no. But you do want to weed out anyone who doesn't participate with your content, or who doesn't bother to read your emails (or worse, marks them as spam). By doing this, you improve your email sender reputation (which improves email deliverability) and you stay compliant with anti-spam laws.

Along with weeding out contacts, you'll want to create content that is engaging, creative, and valuable to your audience. You want to create content that educates and entertains your customers. By doing so, your customers will look forward to your emails as opposed to skimming over them.

"People get hundreds of emails a day. Why should they read yours? Knowing what inspires and motivates your readers is the only thing you need to keep in mind when sending out a newsletter. Create a unique and valuable reason why someone should read your email, and you will grow loyal readers who look forward to discovering what you will send out next."

Nicole Brant-Zawadzki, BZ Coaching

Keep a Regular Schedule

Once you decide to send a newsletter, you'll need to decide how often you'll want to send it. Here are a couple of questions you'll need to ask yourself:

• How much content do you have that you can put into a newsletter?

• How often do you want to be writing a newsletter?

• Do you want to send it weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly?

"Newsletters are a fantastic way to build up your “know, like and trust” factor with your audience. One goal to set is your publishing schedule (weekly? biweekly? monthly?) and implement a routine that supports you being consistent with writing. A newsletter only works if it gets consistently sent out!"

Ashley Jablow, Wayfinders Collective

According to the Campaign Monitor by Marigold, most consumers on average prefer a weekly email (no more than twice a week and no less than once a month). For more information on the best days and the best times to send a newsletter (which is important for open rates), refer to their article linked above.

Make your Emails Mobile-Friendly

The majority of people now view their emails on their phones. If your newsletter is unreadable on a phone or other mobile device, chances are people won't want to subscribe to your newsletter for long. When designing and writing your newsletter, make sure you send yourself a test email. You should then view that test email on both your computer AND your phone (bonus points if you view it on a tablet or iPad). If possible, use a newsletter system that allows you to view your newsletter in both desktop and mobile views.