Emailing tutorial: create a newsletter that works

Emailing is one of the marketing levers that converts the most, provided you implement the right practices. The reason for emailing's excellent performance is simple: subscribers are often engaged with your brand, they are qualified and the email is addressed in a personal way. The same is true of Facebook Ads, which also offers excellent conversion rates.

Creating a newsletter that is opened, read, clicked on and generates few unsubscribes isn't easy, but it's entirely possible by following the steps detailed below in our emailing tutorial. The key lies in two points: measuring your statistics (key KPIs for email marketing) and continually improving your best practices. We'll take a closer look at these two fundamentals here.

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Email open and click rates in 2016-2017

Starting out with the right benchmarks in mind will enable you to set and improve your own targets for optimizing your email campaigns.

Defining performance indicators

• Open rate: Number of emails opened/Number of emails delivered x 100
  The open rate is calculated on the basis of the number of emails received, not the number sent. It reflects the degree to which the subject of the email is relevant to the recipient's expectations.
  
  
• Click-through rate: Number of clicks/Number of successful emails x 100
  The click-through rate reflects the attractiveness of the email content: design, presentation, CTA positioning.
  
  
• Reactivity rate: Number of clickers/Number of openers x 100
  The reactivity rate is close to the click rate. It is used to assess the relevance of content (offers, articles, messages) to the recipient's needs and context.
  
  
• Unsubscribe rate: Number of unsubscribes/Number of successful emails x 100
  The churn rate can be linked to a number of factors: fatigue, unwanted emails, too high a frequency, etc. This rate decreases over time if you start with an imported contact base, stabilizing after 5 campaigns.
  
  
• NPAI: Number of emails rejected/Number of emails sent x 100
  NPAI are emails that are not delivered. There are two reasons for this: soft-bounces (the mailbox is temporarily saturated) and hard-bounces (the address does not exist). NPAI is very high if you buy an e-mail base whose origin you don't know. On the other hand, they are very low if your audience subscribes to your newsletter on its own.
  
  
• Spam rate: Number of complaints/Number of emails sent x 100
  Forced subscription to a newsletter can be very costly. Messaging systems are becoming increasingly impervious to unwanted e-mail, and Internet users are not doing spammers any favors. Since anti-spam filters are mutualized, if several recipients designate you as a spammer, it's highly likely that you'll be blacklisted very quickly.

Average key indicators in France and worldwide

Set a course for yourself with the average indicators reported by various organizations specializing in email marketing:

Source: Average results from SimpleMail, Maddyness, NP6, IBM, SNCD & Experian, Litmus

To track your performance, use email marketing software that offers a dashboard with these indicators alongside Google Analytics.

How to create a high-performance newsletter

To achieve or even surpass the above KPIs, you need to follow a few simple rules:

1. Optimize HTML code

Email marketing software offers pre-designed newsletter templates that conform relatively well to email standards. However, avoid emails containing a lot of CSS code and styles. Messaging systems immediately understand that this is not a standard email, but a marketing email. We offer you a very sober responsive newsletter template to download free of charge:

2. Take care of the email's look: it counts for a lot!

Which of the two e-commerce newsletters below would you be most likely to click on? The one on the right? Make it look good, because the click-through rate will be much higher. At the same time, you'll enhance your brand image.

3. Work on the subject line

The subject line has a major impact on the open rate. The tendency is to make relatively long subject lines that present the essential content of the email so that, without opening it, the recipient knows what he's going to read.

4. Work on the body of the e-mail

Here are the main points to check to optimize click-through rates and deliverability:

• The content of the email should be consistent with the subject line, to avoid disappointment.
• It should not contain too many images (50% maximum). The more images, the lower the click-through rate.
• Messages must be clear and call for action
• CTAs (action buttons) should not be too numerous.
• On mobile devices, images should be placed above text.

5. Choose your sending domain

By default, emailing software sends emails from its own domain. If your contact base isn't completely clean, it's best to stick with this option. On the other hand, if you have a database of users who have actually subscribed to your newsletter, then you should send emails from your own domain. This will be all the better for deliverability and the reputation of your domain name.
For the more expert, it's also advisable to customize email routing from a specific server (with a dedicated IP address). This allows you to control the entire deliverability chain.

6. Segment your contacts

Wherever possible, don't send the same email to all your contacts. It's better to set up a segmentation of your audience to send more relevant emails. Your KPIs will soar!

Download the Sales Intelligence white paper below:

7. Launch your campaign at the right time

In 85% of cases, an e-mail campaign is sent in a highly responsive time slot (in the morning from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., for example). This means that 40% of opens and clicks will take place within the first 3 hours after the campaign is sent. High-traffic B2B sites tend to send emails early in the morning and at the end of the day. In BtoC, it's the opposite: emails are sent when their audience is available (weekends, between midday and 2 a.m., evenings).

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MailChimp, Brevo (ex SendinBlue), Sarbacane. What to choose?

Dozens of tools exist to send your newsletter to the Moon, but not all of them deliver on their promises. Choose a tool with a good reputation. A good way to find out is to see which marketing emails are going into your spam folder and which are arriving in your inbox. Look at the origin of the emails to get a first idea. Then compare email marketing software according to the criteria that make sense to you:

• Automatic database cleansing
• Responsive email editor
• Import and export of contacts
• Ability to create landing pages, forms and popups for your website
• Autoresponder to send automatic emails
• Workflow to automatically tag your contacts
• Integration with your CRM
• etc.

Price is a very important variable too. All emailing software is priced by volume: either by number of emails sent, or by number of subscribers. Choose the most economical pricing option:

• if you don't have many subscribers, but your sending frequency is very high, then opt for a cost per subscriber;
  
  
• if you have a large number of subscribers but a low frequency of mailings, then opt for a cost per e-mail.