8 Essential Ways to Craft the Perfect Newsletter as a Startup to Retain Your Customers

As a startup, those early customers that discover your brand and take their first steps in purchasing your products can seem like gold dust. But what’s the best way to keep them coming back for more? With a high-quality and value-adding newsletter, you can develop a flawless way of building a loyal customer base.

Newsletters are great tools for keeping your business fresh in the minds of customers, but how can you create a winning newsletter that’s guaranteed to retain your customers for longer? Let’s take a deeper look at the art of building value and showcasing your brand in the best possible light:

How to Utilize Newsletters for the Best Impact

Sending high-quality content to your mailing list is a great way of keeping your customers informed and engaged with your business for longer. There are plenty of ways to win the appeal of your recipients through email content, and your newsletter options include:

• Establishing educational content that’s relevant to your customers
• Positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry
• Curate existing content that your audience will love as a time-effective tool
• Offer reminders about the availability of your best products
• Let recipients know how to engage with your brand in different ways
• Hone the personality and voice of your brand
• Strategically placing special offers under the noses of existing customers

The value that your newsletters can bring to your customers cannot be underestimated, but how can you build the perfect newsletter to appeal to their wants and needs without it being disregarded to the trash folder en masse? Here are eight key considerations to take when setting up the perfect newsletter to retain customers:

1. Study Winning Newsletter Examples

All’s fair in love and newsletter crafting. The best way to view which approaches work best is by studying existing examples of newsletters from your competitors.

It can be worth identifying your competitors and signing up to their mailing lists for inspiration, or by image-searching industry-relevant examples online. This can help you to gain a solid idea of where to start and the content to include.

2. Identify a Design that Compliments Your Startup

Your design will be the first thing that readers notice once they decide to open your email, so make sure that your content is neat, simple, and mobile-friendly.

If you don’t know where to start, there are many excellent online template platforms like PoweredTemplate, which can offer thousands of professionally designed options to download as your newsletter template.

This can be a great way of helping startup owners who may not have the time to build functional newsletter templates from scratch, and with a great range of free options, it’s possible for even the biggest bootstrapping business to set up a mailing list in this manner.

3. Never Neglect the Quality of Your Content

We’ll discuss devising an eye-catching subject line later. There’s little point in prompting recipients to open your newsletter if there’s no good content for them to read. \

If you don’t offer relevant and engaging content within your newsletter, you’ll lose the trust of your customers. So it’s essential that you don’t skimp on this aspect of your campaign.

Be sure to create a content strategy just like your blog to ensure that your customers have a reason to read. Include a little variety, access to exclusive offers, and fresh content that they wouldn’t have seen online elsewhere.

4. Go for that Attention-Grabbing Subject Line

If you’re confident that your customers will love your content, it makes sense to get their attention with a great subject line.

Here, a little data analytics can come in handy. Look at the interests of your target audience and utilize a message that resonates with them. The key to a winning subject line invariably involves a little personalization, and to include this with a new offer, or a company announcement can be a great way of adding intrigue.

5. Always Ensure that You’re Adding Value

If you don’t have anything to say to your customers, don’t waste their time by sending them a newsletter.

As a rule of thumb, make sure that any content you allocate to your newsletter contains a consideration as to why it’s relevant to them, and how it can help them in the future.

For instance, if you’re letting them know about a company event, make sure you approach it by telling them exactly what’s in it for them. With this in mind, it’s always a good idea to lead with the benefits of the information that you’re sharing. Crucially, this can help to keep your emails away from the dreaded ‘spam’ folder by ramping up user engagement.

6. Trial and Error can Help to Determine Frequency

Weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletters? The answer to the right frequency is likely down to your business, your target audience, and the industry that you’re in.

Here, the key is to keep things familiar and to inspire curiosity among your readers. If you’re appearing in their inbox every two days there’s nothing new to learn, but if you can continue to pique their interest frequently enough to keep in their minds, it can be a good way to ensure that your customers continue coming back to you.

7. Always Remember Your Call to Action

Your call to action (CTA) should be a key part of your newsletter. Your content can help to inspire interest, and your CTA should deliver the perfect opportunity for a user to follow up on their curiosity.

Avoid throwing in a CTA for the sake of it. Frequent unrelated calls of ‘20% off now!’ could appear spammy, but offering a discount offer or trial for a product they’ve just read about could be a great way to make your readers feel valued and well looked after.

These call to actions can involve links back to your website, your eCommerce page, a specific product page, or even another form of content. But keeping your readers engaged for longer can help to improve your bond.

8. Remember to Promote Your Newsletter

Once you’ve got the content creation process nailed, you’ll need to turn your attention toward promoting your newsletter accordingly. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by promoting the benefits of your newsletter on social media. Focus on the reasons why anyone would want to read your content–whether it’s for freebies, valuable information, or details for upcoming events, and emphasize it online.

Optimizing Your Newsletters as a Cost-Effective Tool

The great thing about utilizing newsletters is that they can be an excellent cost-effective means of retaining your customers over longer periods of time.

Through the utility of free template tools and dedicating some time each week or month to creating fresh content to consume, you can establish an ongoing customer retention tool that ensures your brand will stay in their minds for longer.

By promoting your newsletters accordingly, you can appeal more to your ideal customer profiles to continue to ensure that those all-important conversions continue to flow long into the future.