Did you know that over 75% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last year? According to studies done by Statista, the number of daily email users is growing fast. It’ll reach the 4.6 billion mark by 2025 and generate almost 11 billion dollars by the end of this year.

This means that email marketing can still have a big impact. With such ‌huge potential, the importance of this communication channel is undeniable.

But success takes more than writing catchy emails and sending them to a random list of customers. Today we’ll explore how to develop an email newsletter that’ll keep your customers coming back for more.

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Importance of creating email newsletters your subscribers will love

Newsletters are the bridge between the company and its customers. The more appealing they are to the audience, the more beneficial they’ll be.

(Image Source: Really Good Emails)

A personalized newsletter is more likely to receive a positive response. Positive reaction keeps the audience open to new emails from the brand. It boosts engagement and compels subscribers to recommend and share the brand with friends. This drives extra traffic to the website and generates new leads.

User-centric emails also help the brand connect with individuals by doing the following:

• Making the company more relatable
• Building strong and healthy customer relationships
• Inspiring loyalty even if customers aren’t purchasing
• Turning subscribers into brand evangelists

Newsletters that live up to subscribers’ expectations also influence key metrics. As a rule, the email your subscribers love has high open rates. This leads to higher deliverability rates and a better sender’s reputation.

Your reputation plays a crucial role in successful email marketing campaigns. It gets ISPs on your side, allowing you to avoid spam filters.

Pro Tip: Make sure your newsletter is shareable on different social media platforms. Include share buttons and links in each newsletter, along with subscribe options for new readers to subscribe if they wish.

A guide to creating email newsletters your subscribers will love

So, how do you make a newsletter that subscribers will love? The surprising thing is this isn’t only about delivering value. The success lies in nuances that engage through ‌email content. They leave a long-lasting impression that establishes an emotional connection with the company.

There are a dozen factors that make it happen. Yet, these eight aspects underpin everything. They create a solid foundation to pave your way to the customer’s heart.

Granular segmentation

Did you know that segmentation is the most effective email marketing strategy? The more segmented your email list is, the likelier you are to reach the right person with the right message at the right time. Having groups of subscribers with similar needs and preferences underlies success.

Identifying market segments involves a deep understanding of the target audience. Follow these basic steps:

1. Create an ideal customer profile. This requires analyzing subscribers’ demographics, preferences, expectations, and needs.
2. Analyze the subscriber’s activity at different funnel stages. This delineates leads, qualified leads, opportunities, customers, and evangelists.
3. Assemble psychographic profiles of consumers. You may start by tracing the subscriber’s purchasing history. Then, proceed to an inspection of their behavior on your website and email campaigns.
4. Dive deeper into subscribers’ sources. They provide more information and metrics for sorting individuals into the correct categories.

At the end of the day, you should have well-identified segments.

(Image Source: Klaviyo)

Right email cadence

Creating granular segmentation is half the battle in your technical preparations for crafting an email newsletter your subscribers will love. Another half of the battle requires finding the right email cadence.

(Image Source: Campaign Monitor)

Email cadence implies figuring out the ideal time and frequency to connect with a subscriber. It’s a tricky metric because personal factors like mood can influence it. Yet, ‌studies show that the right email cadence has many benefits.

• It ensures subscribers are more willing to give a chance to the information they received from your brand. This increases engagement and click-through rates, leading to high conversions and leads.
• It may reduce the amount of unsubscribes. Whatever the mood, if an email comes at the right time and frequency, it’ll have less chance of irritating the customer and pushing them back.
• It impacts the relationship you have with your customers. If you constantly deliver to users’ preferences, you’ll eventually turn them into loyal fans.
• It influences key metrics like open and deliverability rates. They stand behind a good sender’s reputation.

Benefits aren’t the only reasons why companies shouldn’t skip this step. Granular segmentation done at the previous stage isn’t enough. Often, individuals within the same audience have different preferences about the time and quantity of emails they want to receive. Finding the right email cadence makes segmentation more accurate and effective.

How to determine email cadence

Determining the ideal email cadence for your subscribers starts with setting the right goals. The first thing to do is to understand what you want to achieve. Then, determine what type of email marketing campaign you need to run. After that, revisit your already segmented list. Your task is to break it into smaller groups with the same behavior patterns.

It takes time to analyze and identify email cadence for individuals. So, don’t rush. Note that events like seasonal sales and holidays will skew the data. Therefore, watch your customers throughout the year to tweak email cadence appropriately.

If you experience problems with finding the right email cadence, you may ask your subscribers. Let them decide what frequencies and times of the day suit them best. This isn’t the ideal solution but can be a good starting point.

Personalization

According to eConsultancy, over 70% of marketers see targeted personalization as a tool to increase customer engagement. Experian discovered that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates. With such impressive stats, it’s hard to oversell personalization. When done right, personalization achieves several crucial goals:

• It delivers true value. It meets the recipient’s demands and expectations.
• It strikes the right chord. Personalization tugs customers’ hearts and builds much-needed emotional connections crucial for healthy relationships.
• It treats each subscriber as unique, considering their preferences, demands, and expectations. This way, people feel appreciated and valued.
• It breaks the ice with newcomers, making them more open to other email campaigns.
• It nurtures loyal customers, fostering brand loyalty and strengthening its market position.

Email personalization is a powerful thing. Even though it requires significant resources and effort, it results in increased conversion rates. In the end, it’ll be cost-effective. There are different approaches to creating relevant and relatable-to-the-person email through personalization. The popular option is to use the recipient’s name and personal greeting instead of a generic “Hello.”

But, if you want to unlock the potential of this marketing tool, you need to dive much deeper. The time-proven tactic is to incorporate valuable content. It involves creating custom content for each person based on the recipient’s data. Check out Why and How You Should Be Writing Segmented Content by Ana Gotter to nail email body copy.

Personalization should also influence the subject line and segmentation. A company may increase the open rate by adding relevant or engaging details in the headline. Personalized segmentation helps the company send emails targeted at each group. It delivers content relevant to their specific needs and expectations.

Last but not least, the key to successful personalization is gathering as much information as possible. Collect only relevant data. Use professional tools and automation to process it efficiently. This way, you’ll create targeted emails for each subscriber without losing precious time.

(Image Source: Unlayer)

Attractive subject line

People judge a book by its cover; the subject line is that cover on email channels. As the first thing a recipient sees, it underlies the campaign’s success. It has the power to make your subscribers love the newsletter.

At first glance, it’s a short preview that tells the reader the message. It helps readers to decide whether the content is worth their attention and time. Yet, many professional marketers know that the subject line is more than a regular headline. It’s a powerful tool in persuading recipients to open the email.

Did you know that the subject line alone compels over 40% of recipients to open an email? Consider it your first and only shot at connecting with readers. It strikes a chord with a few words and builds anticipation when done right.

How do you craft a high-converting subject line?

The tactics for crafting a subject line that your subscribers will love vary. It depends on several factors. First, the goal of the campaign sets the direction. Second, the segment adapts to customers’ preferences.

Follow these best practices to find your way to subscribers’ hearts right at the doorstep:

• Team up the subject line with personalization, proper segmentation, and the right cadence.
• Keep it to 50 characters or less.
• Add a hook to pique interest.
• Communicate promise of value.
• Use emojis to support the message and naturally catch attention in overcrowded mailboxes.
• Avoid lazy writing, cliches, over-used words, exclamation marks, capitalization, spelling, and grammatical mistakes.
• Play psychological tricks.

(Image Source: Designmodo)

Impressive design

Design influences how viewers think, feel, and make decisions. It’s a powerful marketing tool.

For instance, it communicates the message and creates long-standing impressions. It clarifies concepts and illustrates ideas. It also attracts customers and underlies an impressive user experience.

Unlocking the full potential of email design can be tricky.

An email has little space to allow artists’ imaginations to run wild. And unfortunately, email readers only support limited technologies.

As a result, email designers have a 600px width layout and a few techniques and approaches they can use. They also face the limitations of older email readers and mobile phones. However, effective emails with impressive designs are still possible with some creativity and innovation.

Postcards is a perfect example of a design tool developed to enhance email design and improve your email campaigns. It has a hundred design blocks made with the latest trends and standards in mind.

Marketers can bring any idea to life within minutes. The best part is that it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface – anyone can handle it.

(Image Source: Designmodo)

When assembling design in Postcards, adopting the following best practices is crucial.

• Get the fundamental bricks right. This includes copy, structure, heading, margins, whitespace, visuals, links, CTA, color, and typography.
• Focus on the mini landing page experience. Divide the layout into header, main part, and footer. Break down blocks of information into digestible portions and avoid long scrolls.
• Optimize email design for scanning. Follow the “F” pattern to strategically set key points, lead magnets, and CTAs.
• Consider people’s short attention spans. Insert the most important information into the first block. Use the inverted pyramid principle to improve comprehension and shorten the customer’s journey.
• Highlight calls to action without being intrusive. Use action words and tell the viewer exactly what buttons do.
• Be smart with color. It generates emotions. Ensure it aligns with brand identity and the campaign’s mission.
• Be careful with typography. It influences how readers perceive the message and stands behind optimal readability.
• Create a functional footer. It must include an unsubscribe button besides contact information and physical address. This shows your subscribers that there are no strings attached.

Last but not least, hold the attention of your audience with visuals. From wide-screen illustrations to tiny icons, they do several crucial tasks.

• Create a pleasant reading experience.
• Amplify understanding of the key message.
• Complement the written content.
• Keep your target audience engaged.

Perfect accessibility 

Accessibility is a seamless contributor to exceptional user experience. Not only does it address issues for people with disabilities, but it also demonstrates care for everyone.

For instance, it ensures an optimal contrast between background and foreground. Everyone appreciates easy readability in email.

Another pillar of accessibility is to provide equal access to information. For example, using a responsive layout so users may enjoy the content regardless of device.

You can also offer added accessibility by providing text-to-speech and voice-to-text options. These allow people with visual impairments or who are hard of hearing to understand content easily.

(Image Source: W3C)

Interactivity

If there is one thing to add to your email design, it should be interactivity. Interactivity is a secret ingredient that can be a game-changer for brands. It achieves many goals:

• It delivers hyper-personalized content to ‌recipients based on their preferences.
• It feeds viewers with updated information in real time.
• It enables website and app-like functionality within an email.
• It decreases the number of steps subscribers should take to achieve their goals.
• It entertains and improves user experience.
• It reduces ‌contemplation time.

Sadly, not all email readers support these features.

For instance, Outlook is notorious for its inability to display interactive elements. Apple email clients also experience problems in displaying them.

Fortunately, Gmail supports interactive technology, and most people have Gmail accounts.

Thus, when introducing interactivity in email design, follow these best practices:

• Send interactive emails only to subscribers whose email readers support it.
• Start with time-proven solutions like surveys, sliders, carousels, quizzes, and forms.
• Mix interactive elements with gifs and dynamic CSS effects.
• Connect forms and surveys to marketing tools to write answers into the database.
• Learn from website designers’ experience. For example, make the first slide count when using a carousel. That way, if something goes wrong, your readers will still get the benefit of your most important message.
• Push your limits by creating gamified experiences and quizzes.
• Use interactive elements as an invitation to a landing page. Your landing page should match your email’s look and feel and include interactive elements.
• The marketing message always comes first – never prioritize interactivity over content.

(Image Source: OpenJS Foundation)

Professional email design and marketing tools

Marketers have a lot on their plates. From audience segmentation to content creation, it takes a team of talented people to keep marketing strategies working and sales funnels full.

Employing automation is one way marketers can streamline their workflows and maintain high quality and increased output. The right tools make all the difference.

Over 90% of marketers agree that marketing automation helped them achieve their objectives.

Consider email marketing platforms, such as:

• Moosend
• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• ConvertKit
• And more

Their personalization features help tailor emails to specific market segments. Plus, they provide analytics data to track the progress and success of email campaigns. With this data, marketers can make the necessary adjustments for better results in the future.

(Image Source: Moosend)

Email design builders are other integral tools for creating winning email campaigns. They offer modern styles, email templates, responsive blocks, accessibility features, and an intuitive interface. These features allow marketers to design and craft emails that stand out from the hundreds of other emails recipients see in their inboxes every day.

Inbox placement check

You may ask why this technical point is in the guide on creating email newsletters your subscribers love. The answer is simple. If your email ends up in a spam folder, it’s a waste of all your efforts.

This stage involves many tasks. You must authenticate your email, add a digital signature, check your IP address against blocklists, etc.

Yet, everything starts with Unspam. It’s a service that calculates inbox placement chances through several crucial tests. It does the following:

• It inspects emails for spam triggers to reduce the risk of raising flags by spam filters.
• It checks IP and domain blocklists to ensure your sender’s reputation score is high enough to pass ISP’s barriers.
• It hunts down all inconsistencies and errors in authentication protocols.
• It highlights all broken links that may impact the marketing funnel.
• It inspects the body copy and design according to the best practices and latest standards to ensure the best user experience.

(Image Source: Unspam)

Working in tandem with Unspam, marketers can be sure that their readers will receive the digital newsletter they love. This means their efforts and money invested in email campaigns will be well spent.

Conclusion

Almost 65% of startups choose email marketing to connect with their target audience. This oldie-but-goodie means of communication continues to thrive as it bridges the gap between businesses and customers.

Our guide has uncovered the best practices and tips on making the most of email marketing and email newsletters in particular. By following best practices, knowing your audience, testing, and adjusting, you can create email newsletters your customers will love and email campaigns that’ll continue driving conversions.

Andrian Valeanu

Andrian is a skilled web designer, email marketer, and SEO expert with over 20 years of experience. He founded Designmodo, a reputable company specializing in website and email building. Andrian shares his knowledge through guest lectures, interviews, and online publications and is a respected voice in the industry.