Digital communications cover multiple channels and platforms that can be used for marketing or information purposes. Email marketing is one of these channels and it can be combined with further promotion on your SoMe channels.

Last time we looked at reasons to have a newsletter and reasons not to, and some tips for a successful newsletter. Now let’s look at the following seven steps in creating and delivering a newsletter: planning, content creation, team work, quality checking, setting goals, promotion, and performance.

Step 1: Planning

The best place to start is to make a plan. First of all, how often can you publish a newsletter? Make a rough estimate, for example, once a quarter, with a target date for each newsletter. This will give you a place to start from, for example, March, June, September, and December.

Be realistic – it’s better to start with lower expectations and find out that you can be more ambitious than the other way around. You risk putting yourself and your team (if you have one) under too much stress, and letting yourself and your readers down if you can’t deliver.

What are the various steps in the process that you need to think of?

Here are 13 elements to help you plan your newsletter:

• Decide on a timeline for the newsletter from start to finish
• Decide on the sections in the newsletter (videos, news, events, jobs, sign up, etc.)
• Find out who needs to be involved (internal staff, external partners)
• Gather the content
• Put together a draft of the content
• Find images and illustrations
• Decide on a mailing system
• Put the content in a template (often combined with pt. 7)
• Check your subscriber list & update it if need be
• Test rounds: Send out test emails & make edits
• Send out the newsletter to your subscribers
• Share it on other channels and/or inform about it (SoMe)
• Monitor its performance

Timing is everything. You can work backwards from a publication date and set deadlines for each step in the production process. This will help you keep on track and publish on time.

Step 2: Gather your content

The content of your newsletter will depend on the nature of your business. Are you writing as a consultant, a company, an organisation, and what is your business about?

Start by thinking about your subscribers. The following questions are good to ask yourself:

• Who am I writing this newsletter for?
• Who are my subscribers?*
• What do I know about them?
• How can I make my content relevant for them?
• What can I give them in return?

I suggest jotting down some quick answers to each question and then coming up with some categories.

Newsletters from organisations typically have some of the following categories: news, events, publications, calls for participation, videos/recordings or podcasts, members’ news, etc.

There's no one-size-fits-all so you can decide on what content is most relevant for you and your readers. I would also recommend testing this out via A/B testing, a user experience research method, also called split testing. Your mailing system will take care of this for you so you can see what works best with your subscribers and adjust your newsletter accordingly.

* Your subscribers need to have signed up to receive your newsletter, so make sure not to mass mail people who have not confirmed in writing that they want to hear from you. More on this in another blog post.

Step 3: Team effort

When working in an organisation, it’s important to make your leader and colleagues aware that this is a team effort and that this activity can only be carried out successfully together.

As a communication officer, you already need input from colleagues for creating various content of interest for your audiences, whether it’s for the website, for the media, social media, publications or for your annual report.

A communication role is central in an organisation and it relies on close collaboration with colleagues and support from the CEO. Newsletters are just one of many tasks and one of many communication channels. Make sure that you have the necessary support before embarking on this task.

A newsletter can be entirely carried out in-house with communications personnel, content experts (researchers, policy & project officers, others) and a mailing system. Or it can depend on external partners, such as designers, and communication consultants, and IT consultants. You’ll need an image bank and a mailing system (free or at a fee).

Step 4: Quality checking

Everyone knows how embarrassing it feels to send out an email with a typo or a wrong deadline in it. Now imagine the feeling if that email isn't going to just one person or a handful of people, but to your entire mailing list.

It’s better to send out one more test email than to assume that it’s good enough. In my experience, it takes several test rounds until your newsletter is free from small typos, formatting errors or missing links.

Step 5: Setting goals

Why are you sending out a newsletter anyway? Is it because you feel that you should? I would argue that that is not a good enough reason. Have a look at the company or organisational goals and look at your communication strategy.

Define a target audience for the newsletter and look at what resources you have available. What do you want to achieve with it? Improve your visibility and maintain your reputation? Increase traffic to your website? Increase sales? Create new leads?

Goals can be broad, though I would encourage you to make them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic, Timebound). This will help you measure performance and ultimately improve across your communication channels.

Step 6: Promotion

Newsletters are another opportunity to show your audience what you're doing. It's an easy topic to promote on your SoMe channels, and perhaps gain some new subscribers.

Talking of subscribers, before considering spending time on a new communication channel that can potentially be quite time consuming, make sure you have people to send it to.

You'll need to get people to sign up to receive your newsletter and confirm their interest. You can do this via direct email contact or via a sign-up box on your website. You can use this time to decide on the content to offer in your newsletters (see step 2).

Step 7: Performance

As mentioned above it’s crucial to evaluate the performance of a newsletter, as it is for all communication channels. A mailing client will offer some performance analytics: CTR (click-through rate), open rate, unsubscribe rate and more. So will your website analytics if you look at page views and where visitors come from within a few days of sending out your newsletter.

Why should you measure and evaluate your work? The answer is that you should plan, set goals, execute and evaluate what you do, as that way you will both save time and improve your impact.

Basically, you should do what you need to do, achieve what you want to achieve. Then you drop the rest. You can read more about the importance of having goals in my article from 2019 on “Why working without a plan is a waste of time and energy - Be SMART”.

You can even search marketing benchmarks for average click-through rates for your business or industry to compare with competitors. How are other known competitors doing? Sign up to their newsletters and have a look at their social media handles. This will help broaden your knowledge of the market and maybe give you some ideas for your own communications.

Do you need help with your newsletter? Drop us a line at syper@syper.eu.

Read part 1 of this series.