How To Write A Newsletter

If your company runs email campaigns for customers, it certainly isn’t alone. Statista reports that 74% of B2C marketers in a study said they had used email newsletters to connect with customers and get the word out.

Email remains a popular type of marketing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a surefire win. Instead, you’ll need to find a way to stand out in recipients’ crowded inboxes. In the guide below, we’ll walk you through how to create a well-structured, relevant email campaign by understanding your recipients' needs and following an efficient writing process. The best part? You don't need a marketing team or a grade-A writer to do it!

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Identify your email’s purpose

Email newsletters come in an array of formats and styles. First, narrow down what you want your email to achieve, then choose the campaign type that’s best suited to your goal.

If you want to educate new users about your product, send an onboarding email campaign. These messages should show customers how they can get the most value from your product and remind them to use it regularly.

If you want to inform your audience about your newest offering, consider sending out a product launch email. Product launch emails promote new products or events that your business provides and get your audience excited about them.

In addition, you can remind your customers of the value that your products provide by grabbing their attention with a sleek template that showcases your newly released product and its features!

If you want to increase purchases with a sale, send out a promotional email. Ideally, this deal will incentivize customers to visit your online or physical store.

If you want to inform qualified leads about your brand, send them a welcome email. Your first form of communication with your customers or new potential customer should be informative, represent your brand, and make a good first impression.

Know the purpose of your email, and you’ll be able to identify what type of email newsletter you should be writing and sending out.

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Know your audience when you consider how to write a newsletter

Identify a target persona, so you can craft your email in a way that resonates with recipients. Your message’s ideas and tone should align with your core customers’ values, lifestyles, and interests.

You may already have buyer persona research that you can use here. Sift through your different customer profiles to find one that best matches the message’s intent.

If you haven’t done buyer persona research, it’s time to start learning about your customers. Follow this helpful guide to create profiles of the people who are most likely to buy your product. The key is getting inside the minds of your customers to figure out who they are and why they would buy this product.

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Once you have a target recipient profile set, use your persona information to figure out the critical details of your email:

What will the tone and voice be? The way you express ideas will differ based on your recipient’s demographics. A brand targeting college students in their early 20s might use raucous humor in the email, while a company targeting retirees in their 70s will likely keep things a bit tamer.

Why should this person care about this message? The way you influence your audience to buy your product will differ also based on their demographic. For example, new moms may be more motivated to buy a product based on its nutritional content, whereas other demographics may care more about flavor or calories.

What visuals will entice this recipient? A techie may go for a sleeker elegant background, whereas teenage girls may respond best to images that pop out at them and have many colors.

Copy.ai is here to help you curate relevant email text. Our tool generates subject lines that target your audience. For example, see the tool in action with these subject lines for the cleaning product Scrub Daddy.

Copy.ai offers plenty of joyful subject lines such as “Scrub, cute & easy!” or “It’s a sponger with soul” for the homemaker audience.

Want to learn more about tailoring your email subject lines to your audience? Check out our resource How to create sales email subject lines that actually get opened or our email subject line generator!

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Offer recipients something valuable in your newsletter

Now that you know your target recipient, you need to figure out what will make this email worth reading and propel them to take action. In other words, what will they consider to be a value-add?

Consider providing these resources to entice your recipients:

A discount. You could offer your readers a reduced price for your product that they can only get by opening and reading your newsletter. A discount that's exclusive in this sense will get your readers to continue reading your newsletters in the future.

A sneak peek or a spoiler. Whether it’s a product launch or a special event, giving your newsletter recipients a sneak peek that they can only get from your newsletters will entice them to read your newsletter regularly.

Educational content. Offer your readers something that they will learn from or find interesting. Educational content could be a story of how your business got started, a profile of your company founder, or a round-up of interesting webinars.

A customer testimonial. Customer testimonials come in many forms. Say you own a gym or have a product that helps with weight loss, a customer testimonial like a before-and-after photo story can entice customers to use and make the most out of your product.

An event. Events get your audience excited about going out and interacting. It’s also an incredible opportunity for you to do a product launch or have a sale.

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Bath & Body Works CTA

Include CTAs (calls-to-action) that direct readers toward your email’s valuable asset. That might be a colorful image that leads to your store’s “sale” page or a button that leads to your latest blog post.

Bath & Body Works puts CTAs with discount codes in their newsletter product launch emails. The bright product image CTAs usually take recipients straight to those sale items on their website and to products similar to those displayed.

Whether you know it or not, your newsletter will have an impact on your subscribers.

The goal is to ask yourself, “What will my readers want to get out of my newsletter email?” You need to be able to answer that question. If you can’t answer that question, then you need to give them something of value in your newsletter.

If you're hoping your newsletter has some hidden value, think again! To craft a worthwhile newsletter, you have to be proactive and brainstorm what recipients want.

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Make your newsletter skimmable

It’s human nature to rush through whatever it is that you’re reading. Your newsletters are no exception, so you want to make sure that they’re easy to glance over. Make critical information effortless to find.

Incorporate BLUF, which stands for Bottom Line Up Front. Get to your point right away in the first sentence or two of your body paragraphs.

Create quick, digestible headings. Make your headings concise by making them only one line long. Readers should also be able to tell what the section will be about just by reading the header.

Use email templates that organize information in visually stimulating ways. Copy.ai offers templates for several email types—welcome, confirmation, follow-up, and more.

Include images in your newsletter so that your subscribers can get the visual gist of what the section includes. Visuals will also help to break up text and make it more scannable.

And if the images are high quality, they’ll likely grab recipients’ attention. Unsplash has a database full of creative photos that can help you make your newsletter more visually stimulating.

Ensure your newsletter is cell phone optimized. According to Statista, marketing emails are opened on mobile devices 49.3% of the time. So if people have to adjust your message to fit their device, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to read it.

A great way to get ideas for your newsletter is to go through your email inbox and see what newsletters jump out at you, resonate, and are easy to skim through. Use them as examples of what works and apply them when you’re writing your newsletter.

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Use tools to craft punchy text when you write your newsletter

You’ve researched your audience and organized your email in a scannable way, but how are you going to write text that stands out and speaks to the reader?

By this point in the newsletter creation process, you may be feeling drained creatively. Luckily, there are Copy.ai tools to help you find the right words when you’re dealing with writer’s block or feeling stuck.

Use Copy.ai’s sentence simplifying tool to reduce your word count. This cuts out the unnecessary details and helps you summarize what you’re trying to say and get straight to the point. It’s super helpful when you’re working on the BLUF paragraph intros.

These two sentences say the same thing, but the revised sentence on the bottom uses a different set of adjectives, making it free-flowing.

Copy.ai’s passive to active tool is helpful for anyone who is trying to sound more authoritative. It’s a common issue for writers. Writing in a passive tone isn’t necessarily wrong, but you want to give your newsletter a direction and a firm tone

Again, these two sentences say the same thing, but the tone is changed by changing the sentence from passive to active. The sentence in the active tone sounds more assertive and robust.

Apps like Grammarly and Hemingway find mistakes in your writing, like spelling and punctuation errors. Reading your newsletters aloud helps you identify places where the language is awkward or needs revising.

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Be genuine in your newsletter

When writing a newsletter email, it's tempting to only focus on what you think the recipients want to hear. However, while you should have their interests top of mind, you don't want to please them at the cost of authenticity. So instead, give them a message that's memorable yet honest. Today, consumers can sniff when a brand isn't genuine, so be true to your brand as you engage recipients.

Communicate your brand values in little to no time with Copy.ai’s AI writing tools.

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Want to learn more? Check out our articles on:

How to write a discount offer email

How to write a blog post fast

Or our tools:

Free product description generator

Free slogan generator

Free Instagram caption generator

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