Define your newsletter goals
The first stage to writing a newsletter is always to figure out why you’re writing it in the first place. What are your goals? Keeping these goals in mind is helpful when deciding on topics, and when creating a call-to-action. But we’ll come to that later.
Research your audience
Before you start writing, let’s take some time to research your audience. This will help you understand who they are and what speaks to them. Understand what they’re interested in and what would make this type of person want to read your newsletter. If you focus on topics that matter to them, they will stay engaged further into the content.
A good way to perform audience research is to use Google Analytics. We will be publishing a guide to using this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. Once this is set up on your website, with the correct settings enabled, you will be able to gather data on the people using your site. This may or may not be the target audience for your newsletter, so always keep your goals in mind.
If you want to target specifically pre-existing customers, your company may have some spreadsheet data on customers that could be of use (as long as policy allows it). For instance, a holiday company might want to include a section in their newsletter about their winter ski holiday sale, but their customers who only ever book holidays in hot, sunny places wouldn’t necessarily be interested in this section, so they might create a separate newsletter for those customers without that section. This keeps those people engaged in the newsletter, as the topics more accurately reflect their interests.
Plan your newsletter topics
Make sure you have your topics planned out before you start writing. This helps you focus your content on your target audience’s interests, ensuring that they are engaged for as long as possible. List your main topics as subheadings, then break each one down into its component parts to guide the creation of your paragraphs. This will help you create a clear structure for the content in your newsletter and make it easier to write.
Good topics to cover can include, but are not limited to:
- Any major changes to your products/services that may affect your customers
- Any awards or certifications your company has recently received
- In some smaller companies, changes in staff may be of interest to your customers
- Celebrating recently well-performed jobs or happy customers
Tell a story
People love a good story. When writing your copy, don’t simply list things that have happened and state facts. Instead, think about how each item of discussion came to be. Tell its whole story, from beginning to end. For instance, rather than a roofing company saying they had a happy customer who recently had a roof completely re-fitted, they could explain that the old roof had major damage sustained in a recent storm, and after only 10 days, a brand new rood was fitted, ensuring the family had a roof over their heads for the winter. It tells a story with low points and high points, which engages the reader more than a statement only describing the outcome.
Create a call-to-action
Once all your main content is written up, it is important to end the newsletter with a call-to-action (CTA). A CTA should first and foremost assist in the completion of the goals that you determined before writing the newsletter. For instance, if the purpose of the newsletter is to get more traffic to your website, place a link to your website near the end, with some copy asking the reader to see your website.
Be sure to make the CTA a simple action that doesn’t require much thought, if possible, as people are more likely to follow through when given clear instructions.
The Bottom Line
In summary, the main points to remember are to:
- Define clear goals for the newsletter
- Determine what topics will interest your target audience
- Tell a story
- Use a call-to-action (CTA)
Remember to keep an eye on our blog page for further tips, such as the upcoming Google Analytics guide.
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