Email Newsletter

Email newsletters are the most common type of emails in email marketing. As the name suggests, they often contain news and updates, aiming to keep the audience engaged. At the same time, they are designed to gently push users towards the conversion. After registering with SendPulse, you can send email newsletters for free.

In this video, the SendPulse marketer explains how to come up with newsletter ideas for marketing campaigns.

Some marketers claim that newsletters are not much of a leap to set up, but newsletters that are created with attention to detail are sure to pay off. The role of an email newsletter in your overall email marketing strategy may be significant.

Let’s discuss how email newsletters can help your business prosper.

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  Coverage. Over 3.8 billion people use emails. Every day people send and receive 281 billion emails on average. Business emails make up a majority of emails sent daily, around 109 billion. If used wisely, email newsletters can cover enormous audiences in a short period.

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  Effectiveness. Email marketing yields a near 4000% return on investment, and the email newsletters are a crucial contributor to that success. It proved to be the most commonly used type of email for engaging with the clients.

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  Personalization. Email marketers usually take their consumers’ behavior and preferences into account. That approach pays off because personalized emails offer products that people are very likely to purchase. As a result, we have email newsletters that help meet the needs and expectations of various social groups.

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  Credibility. Why not utilize newsletters to share upcoming trends in your niche or a behind-the-scenes look at your manufacturing process? That is a fair opportunity to highlight your expertise in a certain field and increase subscribers’ understanding of your credibility at the same time.

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  Relationship. The overwhelming competition in internet marketing stimulates brands to get more creative and genuine. Businesses that give more, tend to get more in return. Email newsletters are an excellent channel for building long-lasting relationships with the audience.

Create a newsletter yourself!

Design a beautiful email newsletter in an hour — for totally free and without knowing HTML. Personalize, segment, and schedule it to get the best results with SendPulse.

Register and send an email newsletter!

What is the purpose of an email newsletter?

Brands send email newsletters to inform their subscribers about recent news and updates. These emails have nothing to do with selling — they’re about building customer loyalty with the help of useful content. Below we considered several goals that you can reach by sending newsletters.

• Traffic increase. Email newsletters usually contain useful tips, how-to guides, short checklists with links to original articles and posts where users can study the subject in detail. This way, you can easily increase traffic to your website or blog.
• Brand awareness and recognition enhancement. If you share valuable and unique content, your subscribers will wait for your next email newsletter. They will associate your brand's logo and sender name with the positive experiences they get from your emails. This is one of the steps to build brand authority.
• Increased sales. Despite the non-commercial nature of email newsletters, they can help you increase sales indirectly. For example, you can share a detailed guide on how to use your service more effectively or offer your recipients a case study of one of your successful clients. If this material looks reasonable to your audience, those who haven’t yet decided to buy will have more reasons to do this.
• Social media profiles promotion. If you have just created a profile of your brand on Facebook or Instagram, you can easily promote it by adding links to your email newsletter. Mention why your account is worth following and tell the recipients what information you share in social media. Note that you should create different content for each channel, otherwise, there’s no value for subscribers to join your community.

The Best Time to Send an Email Newsletter

This question is still disputed by marketers. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but note that sending too many emails is one of the main reasons that users unsubscribe.

According to the research, 60% of people want to receive promotional emails from brands weekly, and more than 80% — monthly. A little over 10% of people would like to get an email every day. Take into account that these stats apply to promotional emails. An email marketing strategy usually implies sending not only advertising emails but newsletters, trigger, and transactional emails. This means that you should thoroughly plan the entire number of campaigns you send so that you don't scare away your audience.

To send consistently but not to overdo it, we strongly recommend creating an email marketing calendar. It should contain all the emails you’re going to send users each month. This way, you will have a clear picture of your marketing activities and you will be able to make changes on the go.

The best option is to ask subscribers how often they would like to hear from you. Provide each email newsletter with a link to an email preference center where users can set up the desired frequency. Also, it's a great idea to inform leads about your email sending frequency in the subscription form. This way, they will be fully aware of your email marketing strategy.

Now let's discuss the email structure.

Before we learn how to create and send email newsletters, we need to understand their components:

1. Template. A web designer creates an HTML-template for a future email newsletter. It must look professional and conform to the brand’s visual identity to achieve specific targets. You can start with the basics by taking advantage of SendPulse pre-designed templates.
2. Design. The recipient should recognize the brand by the colors, forms, and fonts used in the email newsletter. Every image and piece of text needs to be informative and intelligent, and by no means irritative.
3. Copy. A better part of an email newsletter should entertain and educate customers. The rest of the email should focus on promotion. A little promotion contrasting with a good portion of high-quality content is an excellent choice. Remember, with most email newsletters less is more.
4. Subject Line. It is the first thing people consider when they open an email, so make it count. The perfect length of the subject line is around 30-50 symbols, and it depends on your style and goals. Whatever the length, an email newsletter is more likely to be opened when the subject line is creative, funny, and intriguing.
5. CTAs. The promotional part of email newsletters should contain a call-to-action — a button with a link to a specific website page. Yet don’t add too many of them to avoid looking pushy. A good CTA clearly reflects what action the reader should take: “Learn more,” “Make an order,” “Get discount.”
6. Sender’s name. It is the first thing recipients see alongside the subject line. It’s okay to use your real name, it makes your email newsletter sound more friendly. It's another way to cut the distance between a business and its customers and humanize communication.
7. Unsubscribe link. It may seem odd, but the doors should always be opened for consumers — in both directions. It's hard to say goodbye to your leads when you’ve just put so much effort to bring them in. Well, guess what’s left after your click the unsubscribe link — genuinely interested people who will form a community around your brand.

Email Newsletter Size

Your email newsletter's success depends not only on the content you share but on the technical side of things which include email size. It's extremely important since it influences user experience. If a reader needs to scroll left and right to read your email, your CTR will dramatically decrease. The bigger the height of your email, the higher the chances are that recipients won’t read it to the end. The larger your image file size, the higher the probability is that they will either take a long time to load or won’t load at all.

So, to stay on the safe side, keep the following effective tips in mind.

1. Stick to a 600px email width. 600 pixels is considered the email width standard for any device. Of course, you can change the size, but test if it displays well on any screen resolution and across the devices your subscriber use.
2. Try different email length. There are no strict rules regarding this measure. Still, email marketers recommend putting vital information above the fold since the average readers’ attention span is eight seconds. Besides, the more topics you cover in your email newsletter, the less your readers will be able to focus on each of them. So, you’d better work on data quality rather than quantity.
3. Keep the size of the email to 102 Kb or less. Email size best practices suggest that your HTML file of the email shouldn’t exceed 90 Kb. Note that image weight doesn’t add to the actual HTML file.

To eliminate any trouble with email newsletter size, choose a professional email service like SendPulse. The service provides pre-designed email templates that are responsive by default. It means that the email will look great on any screen resolution. If you create a template with the drag and drop editor, it will be responsive as well.

Lots of email marketing services assist small companies and big corporations in streamlining communications with their audiences and automating converting leads into clients. In this section, we'll review the top 5 services that let marketers lean back in their chairs and reap the benefits of email marketing.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a multifunctional platform that enables marketers to deliver relevant and timely messages to their customers via several channels: email, SMS, web push notifications, chatbots, and landing pages. There’s no need to code since a visual drag-and-drop email editor allows you to create a stunning email campaign without breaking a sweat. Ready-to-use segments and advanced personalization tools let you design highly tailored emails based on the data you have about your subscribers and their engagement level. With a flexible automation tool, you can develop triggered email flows that will bring back users to your site or shopping cart, remind them about upcoming events and sales, ask clients to leave a review, etc.

SendPulse features:

• email personalization;
• email segmentation (+ready-to-use segments);
• subscription forms;
• 100+ ready-made email templates;
• marketing automation;
• 24/7 multilingual customer support available by chat, email, phone;
• A/B testing;
• multi-user access;
• webhooks for transactional emails.

SendPulse integrates with many popular platforms like Google Analytics, Stripe, Bitrix24, OptinMonster, WordPress, Opencart, Drupal, etc. SendPulse email verifier allows you to check email addresses on your list to improve deliverability and sender reputation. The service provides a free and easy-to-use CRM platform to manage and contact your leads and clients from one place.

Below you can see what creating an email campaign with SendPulse looks like. You need to drag the necessary elements to your working field and design them to your liking.

Free plan

You can send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers every month. Create 5 automations, make 100 verifications per month, and add up to 3 sender’s addresses and 1 domain.

Paid plans

Paid plans start at $6.40 per month. At this price, you can send unlimited emails to 500 subscribers, create 10 flows, save 5 segments, and access email testing.

Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you $16/month; 5,000 subscribers — $28; 10,000 — $42.40.

You can also buy Pay As you Go plan.

MailChimp

MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that lets you send the right campaigns to the right audiences via several channels, increase sales with email automation, use creative tools for designing original content, and reap the benefits of the audience tools to create a smart strategy. MailChimp Customer Journey Builder enables you to convert more prospects into clients with flexible experiences. With the Audience Dashboard, you can gain valuable insights into your subscribers; check out top tags, trends, and locations, and uncover email marketing engagement.

MailChimp features:

• email personalization;
• email segmentation;
• subscription forms;
• 100+ pre-designed email templates;
• Subject Line Helper;
• Content Optimizer;
• Customer Journey Builder;
• Send Time optimization;
• A/B testing;
• Content Studio;
• smart recommendations.

MailChimp integrates with lots of services to let you make the most out of your strategy. You can integrate with Shopify, Stripe, Squarespace Commerce, LiveChat, Zendesk, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, etc. MailChimp data-driven tools allow marketers to predict purchase likelihood, customer lifetime value, and best prospects to target.

Below you can see how to create an email campaign with MailChimp. You can drag any of the blocks below into the campaign preview on the left and edit them to your liking.

Free plan

You can send up to 10,000 emails to 2,000 contacts per month. Create 1-step automations, use subject line helper, design surveys, and get email support for 30 days.

Paid plans

The service offers 3 plans that start at $11. Using the “ Essentials” plan, you get 24/7 support, create A/B tests, schedule your email sending, and access smart tools.

Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you $34/month; 5,000 subscribers — $59; 10,000 — $87.

You can buy email credits on request if you don't send emails regularly.

On average, SendPulse is two times cheaper than Mailchimp — see for yourself!

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a multichannel marketing platform that lets brands communicate with their audience via email, SMS, Facebook, chat, and CRM. This service allows small businesses to grow faster without much investment and dedication to the technical side of things. If you’re not a tech-savvy marketer, Sendinblue is just for you. Its straightforward interface enables you to build beautiful emails with a drag-and-drop editor, personalize their content, create segments, and optimize the sending time with the machine learning functionality. Design automated email workflows to save time, boost conversions, and build strong relationships with customers.

Sendinblue features:

• email personalization;
• signup forms;
• customer support via chat, email, and phone;
• send time optimization;
• transactional email management;
• A/B testing.

To extend the platform functionality, you can integrate with lots of platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, Optinmonster, Stripe, Intercom, PayPal, etc. You can manage all customer interactions via a single CRM platform provided by Sendinblue.

Check out below how to create an email campaign with Sendinblue. Drag the necessary elements to your working field and go to the “Design” tab to edit them.

Free plan

You can send up to 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts. Send personalized emails and SMS, create customized sign-up forms, and get email support.

Paid plans

The service offers 3 plans that start at $25 per month. Using the “Lite” plan, you can send 20,000 emails to unlimited subscribers and receive email support.

Sendinblue charges its clients by the number of emails regardless of the number of subscribers on the list.

Compare Sendinblue with SendPulse.

GetResponse

GetResponse is a simplified tool to increase your outreach, engage customers effectively, and blow up sales. It fits entrepreneurs, marketers, and large companies. GetResponse provides a list of solutions to generate more leads, sell your knowledge, and engage clients. The platform lets you send email newsletters, automated emails, transactional emails, etc. With intuitive design tools, you can create professional emails or make use of ready-made templates. Custom segments, dynamic content, and perfect time sending enable you to send relevant messages to the right people at the best time. GetResponse allows you to make your emails shoppable to boost sales and run multichannel campaigns to drive more traffic to your site.

GetResponse features:

• email personalization;
• email segmentation;
• sign-up forms;
• ready-made email templates;
• automation emails;
• autoresponders;
• 24/7 multilingual customer support available by chat and email;
• A/B testing;
• Perfect Timing and Time Travel.

GetResponse integrates with a great many tools to streamline your communication with clients. You can empower your strategy by integrating the platform with Google Analytics, WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, WooCommerce, Shopify, etc. You can visualize your automated customer journey by building a workflow based on a client’s data and behavior.

Look below how creating an email newsletter in GetResponse looks like. Drag the elements to your field and go to the “Message style” tab to design them.

Free plan

You can send unlimited emails to 500 contacts per month. Create sign-up forms and use pre-designed templates. You can try the following premium features for 30 days: marketing automation, advanced segmentation, get 24/7 access to the customer support team via email or chat.

Paid plans

The service offers 3 plans that start at €13.12 per month. At this price, you can send unlimited messages to 1,000 subscribers and use basic segmentation and email scheduling.

Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you €22.14/month; 5,000 subscribers — €39.36; 10,000 — €56.58.

On average, SendPulse is twice cheaper than GetResponse — see for yourself!

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign helps B2B and B2C companies build meaningful connections with their audiences and improve customer experience. With ActiveCampaign, you can develop a powerful email marketing strategy, reinforce it with automation tools, boost sales and keep track of leads using a built-in CRM. Send broadcast emails to talk to wide audiences at once, increase subscriber engagement with trigger emails, send the right messages to the right people via targeted emails, and nurture leads effectively with email autoresponders. The platform lets marketers use clients’ data from every touchpoint to send timely messages when they’re most likely to convert.

ActiveCampaign features:

• email personalization;
• advanced segmentation tools;
• sign-up forms;
• ready-made email templates;
• automation emails;
• autoresponders;
• multi-user editing;
• geotracking;
• customer support available by chat and email;
• A/B testing;
• sales pipeline automation.

ActiveCampaign integrates with over 800 services to bring the most value. These platforms include Shopify, JotForm, WordPress, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Prestashop, etc. With ActiveCampaign, you can get a complete customer view, score leads effectively to identify their position in a buyer’s journey, and predict sales.

To create an email campaign, you need to drag the necessary elements to your working field and edit their design.

Free plan

ActiveCampaign has no free plan, but it provides a 14-day free trial to try the benefits of the service.

Paid plans

The service offers 4 plans that start at $15 per month. At this price, you can send unlimited messages to 500 subscribers, use segmentation and create subscription forms.

Sending emails to 2,000 subscribers will cost you $61/month; 5,000 subscribers — $99; 10,000 — $174.

On average, SendPulse is cheaper than ActiveCampaign — see for yourself!

How to create an email newsletter for free?

In this section, we’ll walk you through creating an email newsletter with SendPulse. You don’t need any coding skills or technical knowledge. Follow these 7 steps.

Step 1. Register or login

If you don’t have an account, register. Alternatively, you can sign in with Facebook or Google.

Then, click “Create a campaign.”

Step 2. Add the information about your campaign

Choose a mailing list, sender email address, and name, and write your subject line.

Select one or several mailing lists.

You can use segmentation to provide subscribers with personalized offers based on their personal data.

Write a creative subject line to increase your email newsletter open rate. You can add emoji and personalize it by clicking {}.

Step 3. Design your email copy

You can design an email template from scratch or edit a pre-designed template with the help of a drag-and-drop editor.

Add images, text, buttons, videos, and social links. Edit each element with the right menu.

Step 4. Add email preheader

Email preheader lets you provide more information about your campaign before subscribers click through your email. It’s another chance to drive their attention.

Step 5. Set campaign parameters

You can monitor opens and clicks and provide each link with the tags to check out the sources of a click-through. Create a custom unsubscribe page or link to a default one. Choose the language of an unsubscribe form.

Step 6. Double-check

Preview your campaign before sending it. To avoid the spam folder, our Wizard provides anti-spam recommendations. Check them out to improve email deliverability.

Step 7. Send your email or schedule it

You can either send your email newsletter immediately or schedule email sending. Write a new subject line to resend an email to subscribers who haven’t opened it.

When everything is ready, click “Start.”

Congrats, your email newsletter is sent! Check its status and statistics after sending.

Email Newsletter Examples

We’ve gathered three great examples, hoping that it will help you create emails of the same quality.

Grammarly. Here is an excellent example of a highly personalized email newsletter based on how the user interacts with their service.

TED. This company sends weekly recommendations based on the topics you like, and the content you’ve previously watched or shared.

Growthrocks. Their newsletters are always in plain text, being brilliant, funny, and to the point.

Let's now review the tips which will help you create excellent emails, too.

We’ve collected a list of the most vital tips to help you create great email newsletters and skyrocket engagement with subscribers. Here they are:

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  Clean your mailing list regularly. Try to reactivate users who haven’t shown any signs of activity for three months or more. Some will react, but you’d better remove the rest from our list. Why? Because email service providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) denote your newsletters as irrelevant, which harms your sender reputation.

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  Segment your subscribers. Segmentation will give you a chance to make slightly different email newsletters within one campaign to fit every social group more accurately. With SendPulse, you can segment your mailing list according to gender, occupation, location, age, subscribers’ actions, and more.

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  Be brief but informative. Make your copy clear and concise, people usually don’t have very much time to read complicated clusters of text. Try to approach your audience in their language. Remember, you should be a friend to your customers. A friend they will rely on, trust, and want to buy from.

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  Inject fun, suspense, and cliffhangers in your subject lines. Create a subject line with a sense of humor to increase the open rate. Make it relatively short, but add some flair. Intrigue recipients, so they are dying to know what’s inside. Try A/B testing with SendPulse for free to get the most of your subject lines.

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  Put your grammar on. Double-check your grammar before sending your email. It would be a pity to make mistakes in your email newsletter.

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  Avoid spammy words. Falling into the spam box is the worst-case scenario for your email newsletter. Even though current spam filters are more sophisticated and able to analyze the context of your words, you’d better be careful. Avoid any of these spammy words.

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  Don’t forget about alt text. If an image isn’t loading for some reason, alternative text saves the day and describes the missing image. It gives you a chance for your message to be understood even without pictures.

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  Care about people’s visual perception. When the copy, images, and CTAs are set up, leave a lot of white space in the message. This way, your email newsletter will be easy to read.

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  Make it mobile-friendly. Make sure your email looks good on different mobile devices because about half of all email users open emails on mobile devices.

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  Schedule your emails intelligently. Develop a schedule based on your customers’ lifestyle. Find out when it’s convenient for people to read your emails. Keep on sending emails regularly, but let the people breath. Otherwise, they’ll unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam.

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  Analyze. Monitor how effective your emails are. Keep an eye on your click-through, open, and unsubscribe rates. Rely on these metrics when implementing changes if anything goes wrong.

Here's a detailed instruction on how to create perfect email newsletters with SendPulse.

References

1. The article "How to Create an Email Newsletter [Checklist]" on the HubSpot blog offers 12 useful tips on creating an email newsletter.
2. The article "45 Engaging Email Newsletter Templates, Design Tips & Examples For 2019" on Venngage blog suggests newsletter design tips and examples to follow.
3. The article "How To Create a Newsletter Design in 7 Steps (+ Newsletter Templates)" on Crazy Egg blog explains the purpose of an email newsletter and the way it works, offers seven steps to follow while creating one, suggests templates, ideas, and best practices.
4. The article "Email Newsletter Design: Guidelines And Examples" on Smashing Magazine comes up with examples and guidelines for email newsletter design.
5. The article "How to Create an Email Newsletter People Actually Read" on HubSpot blog suggests ten tips for creating powerful email newsletters.

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Last Updated: 09.04.2024