How to Create a Newsletter for Free | Step-by-Step Guide

A newsletter is one of the most popular email marketing tactics that can help brands bring in more conversions. This is backed by statistics that show that email marketing has a significant $42 return on every $1 spent, along with 81% of small and medium-sized businesses relying on email as their primary tool for customer acquisition.

However, knowing how to create a newsletter is not always an easy task, as a number of factors play a vital role in its design, content, tone, messaging, format, and deliverability.

Most importantly, you should never send generic newsletters as they won't yield the results you want. So, using the right tools to send personalized and customized newsletters in bulk is another important thing to consider.

We will teach you all about how to create an email newsletter in the best way possible you can send it out in bulk.

How to Create a Newsletter: Defining Its Core Strategic Value

Let's go through some basics first.

What is a Digital Newsletter?

A digital newsletter is a periodic email communication sent to inform, engage, update, or nurture subscribers. These subscribers are part of the email subscriber list and have given the brand permission to send marketing emails, such as newsletters, to them.

A newsletter can contain a variety of content, such as stories, insights, product updates, how-to guides, tips, and different resources. So, there is no one specific trick to learn how to create a newsletter. Instead, the trick is to deliver consistent value through relevant content over time.

If done well, a digital newsletter can be a highly effective and productive channel to help customers move forward in their journey.

Benefits of a Newsletter for Businesses

Growth leaders, marketing directors, and founders should definitely know how to create a newsletter email as a recurring asset to get these benefits:

So, knowing how to create a digital newsletter that scales is all about designing a consistent system, and not just an email template.

How to Create a Newsletter that Converts?

Once you decide to use a newsletter as a strategic marketing channel, you will wonder what content goes in it. This is a solid question because the content is where you will win or lose subscribers.

The following are the key elements of an effective newsletter:

1. Headline and Subject Line

Do you know that 47% of recipients open emails based on the subject line, while 69% report emails as spam based on the subject line?

It means that the subject line of any email is your very first pitch to the customers. No matter how good the body content is, if the subject line is not compelling, nothing else will matter. So, focus on creating an engaging headline.

• Keep it short, within 30–50 characters
• Focus on benefit or curiosity, e.g., "AI solution to reduce churn."
• Avoid spammy words like "Free," "Purchase NOW!," or "Urgent!!"
• Always try two variants via A/B testing

When you are writing for experienced recipients, you can use a more clever or layered subject line to build curiosity.

2. Content Is King

Your content must deliver once the newsletter is opened. This is your chance to sell your brand and reinforce that the recipient has made the right choice to read your digital newsletter.

Here are some content-related tips you should follow to create a successful newsletter:

• Start your newsletter with a useful tip or question to provide instant value
• Use short paragraphs to make reading easier and quicker
• Incorporate visuals, such as data charts, to boost engagement
• Add relevant links with CTAs. A single CTA can boost email clicks by 371%
• Personalize the content, wherever possible, and use your unique brand voice and personality.

3. Mobile-First Design

More than half of emails are opened on mobile devices, so your newsletter must look good in a mobile inbox. Otherwise, you will risk losing a significant portion of potential recipients.

Here are some key best practices for a newsletter design:

• Use a single-column layout, as two-column designs often collapse on mobile screens
• Use at least 14px font and sufficient line-height to avoid cramped text
• Make the CTAs tappable with sufficient spacing
• Ensure images scale and don't overflow on different screens
• The first screen (before scrolling) should clearly communicate what is inside the digital newsletter

4. Crafting a Powerful Call to Action (CTA)

A newsletter is not just an email with content. Instead, it is supposed to be a catalyst for some action and conversion. You can craft powerful CTAs for your newsletters:

• Make it specific, such as "Schedule your demo"
• Use active language.
• Provide a reason why the recipient should click now.
• Place the CTA button where it makes sense, and not just at the bottom.
• Use suitable colors, such as a contrasting button color, to make it stand out.
• Try different text and placement (inline link vs button vs banner) to find the right balance.

5. Personalization and Segmentation

Even the most well-designed newsletter can fail if they are not speaking to the target audience. Therefore, focus on creating a newsletter email that is both relevant and personalized. Personalized emails can boost open rate by 188%

• Analyze the customer behavior and segment them to ensure the newsletter content matches the recipient's intent.
• Segment the target audience by lifecycle stages
• Use dynamic content blocks
• Keep testing and refining to see what is resonating with your audience

With these 5 key elements, you will be in a great position to create a newsletter that converts.

How to Create an Email Newsletter: Inspiration by Industry

Every marketing and growth team loves a ready-to-use newsletter email template to save time. So, here are different text templates for 3 industries that you can use to send engaging newsletters to your audience.

How to Create a Newsletter for Free: Checklist, Testing & Optimization

Learning how to create a newsletter email becomes quick and easy when you have a specific checklist and optimization strategy:

Pre-Send Checklist

Always run through the following comprehensive checklist before sending your newsletter to ensure maximum deliverability:

Analyze Key Metrics

Once the newsletter email is sent, you should focus on analyzing these key metrics:

There can be many other metrics to track, but these can give you a complete picture of how well your email marketing and newsletter are doing.

Using EngageLab to Analyze and Test Newsletters

EngageLab is an end-to-end solution to create newsletters, test them, send them in bulk, and optimize from time to time to make the maximum impact.

Here are some of the many features of EngageLab that can help you improve your newsletters and overall email marketing strategy:

Inbox Preview: It allows you to see how your newsletter will appear to different recipients using varying devices and email services. It helps you test and optimize the design and layout of your newsletters according to your target audience.

Templates: A large variety of multilingual templates is available to help you get started and make sure your newsletter has a proper layout visible to both desktop and mobile users.

User Management: You can manage your email subscriber list from within EngageLab by segmenting the users or using proper tags. It helps you in sending newsletters to the right audience.

Monitoring: You can monitor the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign and the performance of newsletters in EngageLab.

The Cycle of Improvement: How to Use Data to Optimize a Newsletter?

A newsletter should never be "set and forget". Instead, it is kind of a living document that needs continuous improvements in content, design, and overall layout. A general cycle is test, learn, and iterate.

The best part is that when you are using a tool like EngageLab, you can easily turn raw analytics into actionable insights for effective improvement. It tracks subscriber behavior patterns and helps you design newsletter email content that drives the highest engagement.

Moreover, EngageLab supports A/B testing to ensure you are using the right type of content and tone for the right customer segment.

Most importantly, EngageLab Marketing Automation is an effective way of automating your email marketing campaigns to ensure newsletters are delivered on time in alignment with the customer journey stages.

The bottom line is that you should know how to create a newsletter that drives real business results via consistent quality and communication.

EngageLab streamlines this entire process by providing advanced features in its user-friendly interface to help you create professional newsletters without technical expertise.

So, transform your customer communication strategy today by creating newsletters that your subscribers actually want to read and watch!