How to Write a Newsletter Recipients Will Want to Read and Share

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. Standing out requires more than just hitting "send" and hoping for the best. With inbox competition fiercer than ever, how do you create newsletter content that cuts through the noise?

The good news? You don't need to be an award-winning copywriter or have a massive marketing team to succeed. This guide will walk you through exactly how to craft relevant email campaign by understanding your recipients' needs and following an efficient writing process.

Let’s dive in!

The 5-Step Framework for Creating Newsletters That Convert

Ready to transform your newsletter game? Let's break this down into five manageable steps that will take you from "just another email" to "must-read content" in your subscribers' inboxes.

Step 1: Identify Your Email's Purpose

Sending emails without a clear purpose is like throwing darts blindfolded. You might hit something valuable occasionally, but your success will be purely accidental.

So before you dive into your email marketing platforms or start picking newsletter templates, let's get crystal clear on what you're trying to accomplish.

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.

Step 2: Know Your Audience Inside and Out

Now that we've nailed down purpose, let's turn our attention to the people who'll actually be opening these emails—your target audience. After all, even the most beautifully designed newsletter will flop if it doesn't speak directly to its recipients.

Nothing makes subscribers hit that dreaded unsubscribe button faster than irrelevant content. Let's make sure your newsletters hit home with every send.

Identify a buyer 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.

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.

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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 simply use our email subject line generator!

Step 3: Offer Recipients Something Valuable in Your Newsletter

Great! You now understand who you're writing to and why. But there's still a crucial question to answer: why should your subscribers care?

In a world where the average office worker receives 121 emails per day, what's going to make yours worth opening? Let's explore how to deliver real value that keeps your email list engaged and growing.

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.

Step 4: Make Your Newsletter Skimmable

Now that we're offering real value, we need to make sure readers can actually find it! Ever received an overwhelming wall of text in an email and just closed it immediately? Yeah, we've all been there.

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.

Let's make sure your newsletters are easy to digest, even for the busiest subscribers.

• 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.

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• 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.

Remember that white space isn't wasted space—it's breathing room for your content! Using bullet points, subheadings, and infographics can dramatically improve readability and conversion rates.‍

Step 5: Craft Compelling Copy That Converts

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?

Copywriting for newsletters can be particularly challenging—you need to be concise yet compelling, professional yet personable.

By this point in the newsletter creation process, you may be feeling drained creatively. Luckily, there are powerful tools such as 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.

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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.

Pro tip: A/B testing different versions of your content can also reveal surprising insights about what resonates with your email subscribers. Many email marketing platforms like Mailchimp offer built-in testing features that make it easy to experiment with different fonts, sender names, and content types.

The Secret Ingredient: Be Genuine in Every Message

Have you ever received an email that felt like it was written by a robot trying to impersonate a human? Not a good look, right? In a digital world full of automation and AI-generated content, authenticity stands out like a lighthouse on a foggy shore.

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.

Pro tip: Industry news, case studies, and success stories can all add credibility to your newsletter while showcasing your expertise. Consider including a podcast interview or relevant content from your social media channels to create a cohesive cross-platform presence. Your subscribers will appreciate the consistency and your genuine voice.

Final Thoughts

Creating a good newsletter isn't rocket science, but it does require intention, creativity, and a dash of strategic thinking. Think of your newsletter as a conversation with a friend—not a sales pitch shouted through a megaphone. When you focus on providing valuable content that respects your readers' time and intelligence, you'll naturally see higher engagement metrics.

Remember that your email list is one of your most valuable marketing assets. Unlike social media followers who might never see your content due to algorithm changes, your email subscribers have explicitly invited you into their inboxes. That's a privilege—treat it accordingly!

The journey to newsletter excellence is all about continuous improvement. Track your open rates, analyze your click-through rates, and don't be afraid to experiment with different types of content. Each send is an opportunity to learn more about what resonates with your target audience and optimize your approach.

With Copy.ai's GTM AI Platform, you can streamline your newsletter creation process without adding to your GTM bloat. Our tools help you create compelling content in minutes, not hours—giving you more time to focus on strategy and less on wrestling with words.

Want to learn more? Check out our articles on:

• How to write a discount offer email
• How to write a blog post fast
• Transform Content Creation with Outline Generators

Or try our free AI tools:

• Free product description generator
• Free slogan generator
• Free Instagram caption generator

Ready to create newsletters that genuinely connect with your audience? Start applying these principles today, and watch as your subscriber list grow, your open rates climb, and your digital marketing strategy flourish.

Remember: the most successful newsletters aren't just read—they're acted upon, shared, and anticipated. Transform your marketing campaigns today with Copy.ai!