Newsletter marketing strategy: 7 steps & expert tips

Reading Time: 9 minutes

An effective newsletter marketing strategy will support the success of your email marketing.

Though, the content of a newsletter needs to be valuable for audiences, striking a balance between promotional, educational, and entertaining content. 

By achieving this balance, your newsletter will demonstrate your business’s value, expertise, and authority, as well as grow customer leads and facilitate more conversions.

But it’s effectiveness doesn’t come without careful planning — and that’s where our selection of seven expert tips and strategies comes in. 

What is a newsletter marketing strategy?

A newsletter marketing strategy is a plan outlining how businesses can engage with their audience by email. Newsletters provide relevant updates, promotions, and other content to drive conversions and enhance brand loyalty. The plan outlines how it will do this, plus how to promote the newsletter itself to maximize its reach.

Creating an email newsletter strategy involves identifying your business’s target audiences, crafting engaging content, segmenting your email lists for personalization, and maintaining a consistent sending schedule. 

Why a newsletter is an effective marketing strategy

Newsletters should be a central component of your business’s overall marketing strategy for these five reasons:

A direct channel to customers

Email newsletters provide a direct line to your audience. They can keep your business top-of-mind for customers, which can support higher conversions without relying on third-party platforms. Plus, newsletters help to position your company as industry-leading, allowing you to demonstrate and share your expertise.

Emails are proven to engage

Email newsletters are a highly engaging form of marketing, reaching your audience no matter where they are. In fact, the open rate of emails across a wide range of industries is an average of 25.1%. 

Emails are cost-effective

Compared to other marketing channels, newsletters are both highly cost-effective and scalable. Email marketing remains one of the most important marketing channels, delivering a consistent ROI (return on investment). A powerful newsletter marketing strategy will support your ever-improving email marketing ROI, driving conversions and expanding your audience engagement with minimal business expenditure.

Emails can be personalized

Customers increasingly crave personalized communications from businesses — and emails like newsletters provide an easy way of producing content tailored to each individual customer. An email newsletter strategy should plan to customize emails through audience segmentation, increasing overall engagement and conversions by delivering relevant content.

Easy to track performance

The email marketing software your business uses to send newsletters will provide detailed, measurable analytics on metrics, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This helps you to refine your email newsletter strategy for better results via an iterative approach so you can produce more personalized, relevant, and useful audience content.

A newsletter marketing strategy: Essential steps

We’ve compiled seven essential steps for a successful email newsletter plan. By applying these tips, you’ll be well on your way to preparing, launching, and improving your company’s newsletter.

Before you take any of the following steps, you should choose email newsletter software to facilitate your newsletter marketing strategy — you can check out our choice of the 10 best email marketing software for 2024.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to implement these seven best practices for a newsletter marketing strategy:

1. Get subscribers
2. Define your goals
3. Segment your email list
4. Plan content for a few weeks
5. Create email designs
6. Choose the timing and frequency
7. Analyze and refine your strategy

Step 1: Get subscribers

You can have an excellent newsletter marketing strategy, but it won’t have the impact you’re hoping for if you don’t also have subscribers.

Before you hit send on your campaign, you’ll need a high-quality contact list. Building one will help you to drive sales, generate leads, and foster brand loyalty. There are a number of email list-building strategies that you can implement as part of your newsletter planning. 

One of the most reliable ways to get email subscribers is via a responsive signup form. You’ll want to place these prominently on your website — especially in high-traffic areas, such as your homepage or site footer. You can also use popups to capture audience emails.

Offer incentives like discounts or even exclusive content in exchange for email signups, and cross-promote your newsletter on your social media for maximum engagement.

Don’t forget to connect signup forms with your email newsletter software to ensure your leads are automatically added there.

Step 2: Define your goals

Before designing a newsletter marketing strategy, you need to define your goals. Ask yourself what you want to achieve with your newsletter, and build a plan around that.

Establish clear, measurable objectives to guide the design and implementation of your newsletter planning.

You should set quantifiable goals for how you measure your newsletter’s success. Staying on top of your newsletter’s ecommerce metrics will show how effectively your email marketing is reaching its targets.

Common metrics can include:

• Subscriber numbers: You can aim for a specific number of new subscribers within a set timeframe
• Engagement: Metrics like open and click-through rates are trackable via your email newsletter software and will overview how well your content is resonating with readers
• Conversion rate: Set targets for the revenue generated from your newsletter

Measuring your newsletter campaigns’ success with these ecommerce metrics will help you make data-driven decisions to improve and expand your email marketing.

Step 3: Segment your email list

Once you’ve effectively grown your subscriber list, you’ll want to create individualized customer content via segmentation.

Email segmentation allows you to split your subscriber list into smaller groups based on different variables, including demographics, shopping behaviors, location, and more.

Email marketing segmentation allows you to tailor your content effectively to your audience so that you deliver useful, valuable, and relevant newsletters. This increases campaign engagement, improves customer loyalty, amplifies conversion rates, and reduces the risk of users unsubscribing from your newsletters.

Although email segmentation might seem complicated at first, it doesn’t have to be. 

You can check out our 60-second guide to email list segmentation on YouTube:

Step 4: Plan content for a few weeks

No newsletter marketing strategy is complete without forward planning.

Curating compelling newsletter content is helped by organization. You can even use an editorial calendar to organize and plan your newsletter content effectively or create your own calendar online using spreadsheets. 

There are key components to any newsletter, and you should plan these in advance to streamline each newsletter’s design and production. You can see more on these components below in step five.

The subject line for your newsletter needs to be eye-catching and appealing. You also need to consider your use of email images, avoiding oversized or impersonal visuals.

Use personalization to increase the likelihood of engagement. You can always A/B test subject lines to see which performs best for different audiences, as well as make use of an email preheader or preview text.

The art of a newsletter is in balancing educational and promotional content. Audiences will sniff out spam content, which can increase unsubscriptions. 

In the table below, you can see the kind of content you can plan in advance in your newsletter marketing strategy:

Email	Goal	Content
Email 1	Welcome and introduce the brand	Hero image of a featured product or the team, a personal greeting text, a discount code (e.g., “10% off your first order”), and a button linking to the store’s homepage.
Email 2	Build trust and educate	A short video or image carousel showcasing the brand’s story, a quote from the founder, a testimonial, and a Learn More link to the About Us page.
Email 3	Showcase popular products	High-quality images of a few bestsellers with short descriptions, a Shop Now button for each product, and an urgency element like Low Stock! badges.

Step 5: Create email designs

Your newsletter design refers to the textual and visual elements of your email message. This includes your subject line, but it also refers to your use of colors, logos, and fonts. These all need to be consistent with your branding to reinforce your business’s identity.

In step four, we mentioned that newsletters should be planned around certain core components. These components include a header, a block of text (copy), images and videos, a call to action (CTA), and a footer. 

Distinguishing the sections of your newsletter clarifies and declutters its layout, guiding readers through its content with ease. 

Remember that you need responsive emails that automatically adjust and optimize across different desktop and mobile devices. 

Learn how to build a killer newsletter even with minimal experience by watching our YouTube video on email marketing design:

Step 6: Choose the timing and frequency

If you’re a newbie to designing a newsletter marketing strategy, you might not think that choosing the timing and frequency of your emails matters.

It does. You need to establish the optimal sending frequency of your newsletter that balances visibility without overwhelming subscribers. Establish a consistent schedule — you could even use a scheduling feature to automate your newsletters. 

By sending out newsletters at a regular time, your subscribers will know when to expect content from you. You’ll also be building trust by establishing a pattern, demonstrating your reliability and commitment.

Testing your newsletter frequency and timing will help you establish what works best for your audience by identifying optimum open and click-through rates.

It’s also perfectly fine to send ad-hoc newsletters on timely matters, but these should be irregular.

You can use our table below as a guide to help you establish the right timing and frequency for your newsletter:

Newsletter	Frequency	Timing
Welcome series	Three to five emails, daily or every two days	Immediately after signup
Weekly newsletters	Once per week	Midweek (Tuesday to Thursday) at 10 AM or 2 PM
Product announcements	As needed (one or two per month)	Best during working hours or evenings
Seasonal promotions	Two to four emails per campaign	Two or three weeks before and during the event

Step 7: Analyze and refine your strategy

In step two of this newsletter marketing strategy, we mentioned a few key ecommerce metrics around which you can build your email marketing goals and targets. 

These same metrics also provide valuable insight into the quantifiable success of your newsletter. 

You can see an example of the kind of analytics dashboard that email marketing software like Omnisend can provide:

By analyzing the effectiveness of your newsletter, you can continually refine and adapt your marketing strategy to ensure you’re better serving your business’s audience.

Some of the best strategies for analyzing and refining your newsletter’s success include:

• Open and click-through rates: These metrics will give you insight into audience engagement and interest
• A/B testing: Test different subject lines, content formats, and sending times to optimize your newsletter performance
• Feedback mechanisms: Encourage subscriber feedback via tools like survey emails to clarify and improve your content and strategies 

How to market a newsletter

We’ve covered how to build a comprehensive newsletter marketing strategy, but you also need to know how best to market it to your audience.

This will help you to build your email list better and generate more subscribers who can convert into loyal customers and ultimately improve sales.

These are some of the best ways to market a newsletter:

• Website popups and forms: Add popup and signup forms that offer discounts, freebies, or exclusive perks to incentivize your audience to sign up for your newsletter
• Leverage social media: Run targeted ads and teasers to announce your newsletter and feature it regularly on your platforms
• Exclusive offers: Provide subscriber-only discounts, early access to sales, or premium content with newsletter signups
• Collaborate: Partner with influencers or other creators and businesses to cross-promote your newsletter
• Post-purchase signups: Use post-purchase or thank you emails that include signup links
• Free resources: Offer downloadable guides, templates, or exclusive materials
• Referral programs: Reward subscribers for referring your newsletter to friends

Summary

Newsletters provide a direct line to your business’s audience, as well as being a highly cost-effective and engaging form of marketing. 

A comprehensive newsletter marketing strategy will keep your business in contact with your customers, supporting your growth by generating leads and driving sales. 

From defining your goals and building a solid email list to planning content, designing your newsletter, and timing things just right, these seven tips will help you get the most out of your email marketing and subscriber base.

You can also support your newsletter strategy with email marketing software that can support your company’s goals and growth.