How To Create An Email Newsletter Completely For Free

Whether you’re new to email marketing or an email marketing veteran, you’ve heard about email newsletters. But a lot of times people ask what I put in my newsletters? and what’s my newsletter supposed to be all about?

Let’s take a look.

Further, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you how to create an email newsletter easily and completely for free.

What exactly is an email newsletter? An email newsletter in its simplest sense is just an update about your blog or website or your company. But of course, it’s more than that. A lot of times people get hung up on what they should write in their newsletter.

It’s easy to say it should be about news about your blog or website, but that doesn’t really say much. So what should it be about?

Some examples of newsletter content can be

• You’re having a sale on your online store. That can be a great newsletter.

• You have published a new blog post.

• Tips and tricks.

• You have changed your website’s theme and colors.

• You have changed your company’s logo.

• You met a personality that you admire very much. you can write about the meeting between the two of you.

A newsletter is a great way to keep your subscribers engaged.

Also, remember that an email newsletter is not an automated email that gets sent out automatically. That is something known as Autoresponse. If you want to know how to send automated emails to your subscribers, then check my previous post in this email marketing series which is about automating your emails.

Disclosure: Some links in this article are my affiliate links. If you buy any product through any of these links, I’ll get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Such a commission helps me to stay motivated and produce more such content. Thanks in advance if you buy anything from my affiliate links.

The main purpose of this article is to learn to create an email newsletter for free.

So let’s dive into that.

I use GetResponse for my email marketing campaigns and I will be using it to create an email newsletter.

Stay tuned!

How To Create An Email Newsletter For Free Using GetResponse

• Create a free account on GetResponse.

• On your dashboard, navigate to ‘Email Marketing’ and then click on Newsletters>Create Newsletter.

You will be taken to a page where you will need to configure your newsletter. It’s simple. Just follow.

First, you need to name your newsletter. This is for your reference. Your readers won’t see it. I have named it “Sunday Morning Newsletter” (see below in the image).

And you need to select a list to which you want to send this newsletter (see below in the image). A list is simply a list of your subscribers. You can have different lists for different segments of people. For example, a separate list for blog readers, and a separate list for existing customers. To learn how to create a list in GetResponse, I recommend checking out my first post in this email marketing series.

I have selected the “Infoverses Newsletter” list which I had created earlier. This list is meant for my blog readers (for example).

Next, select the email address which will be used for sending and receiving mail. By default, you will see the address with which you signed up on GetResponse. There is an option to add a new address. Add a new email address and confirm it.

Then, create a unique subject line. This is the first thing your subscribers will see.

You might want to send every subscriber a personalized message. Like having their own name in the subject line. You can do this by clicking on the small icon near the emoji icon. It lets you select components like ‘name‘, ‘firstname‘, ‘surname‘, etc.

Suppose a person named John Washington signs up for your email list (the one you chose in the 1st step). He will enter his first name as ‘John’ and his surname as ‘Washington’.

Now in the Subject line if you enter, “Hey [[firstname]], Happy Sunday Morning”, then the welcome email that John will see will have the subject line as “Hey John, Happy Sunday Morning” (see in the image above). Isn’t it cool?

In the next step, you need to select recipients for your mail. Just click on ‘Add Recipients‘. Then, choose the list to which you want to send the email. You will see all your saved lists. Select one or multiple, as you wish. Then, click on ‘Add‘.

Next up, you are required to design the body of your email.

You can choose from a huge library of templates, or you can design from scratch. You can add images, headings, videos, buttons, and whatnot.

Most of the editing process is self-explanatory and I believe you can easily do it on your own.

In the next step, make sure to enable the ‘Tracking‘ feature. It will help you track who opened and clicked your emails. With the paid version of GetResponse, you can also have Ecommerce tracking and tracking with Google Analytics.

Here’s a cool thing. You can also integrate your newsletter with Facebook and Twitter, so whenever you send a newsletter, the message will be shared in the form of a post to your Facebook and Twitter followers.

And finally, you need to decide when to send your email. You can either send it immediately or schedule it for later.

In the paid plans of GetResponse, you even have the feature of ‘Perfect timing‘. This feature sends the email at a time when the recipient is most likely to open it. This is great for increasing your open or click rates.

If everything looks good, just hit the ‘Send message‘ button and boom, your email is sent (or will be sent if you scheduled it for later).

That’s how easy it is to create an email newsletter with GetResponse. I highly recommend using GetResponse for your email marketing needs. I have been using it for a while now and it has never disappointed me once.

If you are a beginner, the free plan of GetResponse is more than you could ask for. The free plan allows you to store up to 500 contacts or subscribers. That’s more than a beginner needs.

So what are you waiting for? Go get your free GetResponse account today.

Email Newsletter Best Practices

Now that you know the importance of an email newsletter and how to create an email newsletter, it’d be worth knowing some email newsletter best practices to get the most out of your newsletters.

Some of the email newsletter best practices are:

1. Use a click-worthy subject line

The subject line is the first thing that your recipients will see. Subject lines decide to a great extent, whether your emails will be opened or left ignored.

For example: Why are HR managers firing good employees in the US?

This subject line makes the reader curious. What may be the possible reason for firing good employees, one may think?

Another thing can be including the reader’s name in the subject line. Reading their own name gives the reader a sense of personalization.

So rather than a plain subject line like, “Hi, here’s my new post“, go for “Hey Ali, here’s something you may be looking for“.

2. Keep your email newsletter design simple

Brian Dean speaks in one of his YouTube videos about how he experimented with a lot of email newsletter designs only to find out that a simple design without any sparkling graphics or visuals worked the best for him. People took the call-to-action the most in a simple email design.

So, rather than wasting your energy on graphics and visuals, focus on the message.

Adding an image or two won’t hurt.

3. Send emails at an optimum frequency

Make sure you don’t annoy your subscribers with two emails in a single day, and not even once daily. I find it very annoying to see someone’s email every day in my inbox.

Also, don’t send out emails too infrequently. It can result in your subscribers overlooking them. You don’t want to be forgotten.

So, send emails at an optimum frequency. It can be a little hard to determine the frequency, so you need to test things out and then go with the best strategy. This leads us to the next email newsletter best practice.

4. A/B Testing

Always test things out before making them permanent. You need to test different subject lines and play with different email designs, and different CTAs in order to know which ones work best for you.

GetResponse allows you to create various versions of your emails and track each version’s data separately so that you can figure out what works and what doesn’t.

5. Make sure your newsletter is mobile friendly

Making your material visible on mobile devices is another email newsletter best practice. Check how the newsletter appears on various screen sizes when sending test emails.

To assist your audience on their mobile devices, make sure to select a font that is not too small and that is simple to read. Any images, recordings, or GIFs you include must be of mid-resolution.

GetResponse has hundreds of cool templates which are compatible with all device types. You can even send test messages in GetResponse to see how your emails will actually look.

How To Create An Email Newsletter For Free Using GetResponse: Conclusion

An email newsletter is a great way to keep your audience engaged. You can share a lot of information with your subscribers through your newsletters. It is a cost-effective medium for building relationships and maintaining regular contact with your audience and prospects.

If you are into affiliate marketing, a newsletter can be a great way to educate your audience regarding the products that you recommend.

Creating an email newsletter is no rocket science. In this post, I showed a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to create an email newsletter for free using GetResponse.

Now, I turn it on to you.

Have you started your newsletter already? And if not, what are you waiting for? Tell me in the comments below.

This is the third and final post in my email marketing series. Check out the other two posts for becoming a pro at email marketing.

• How to capture email addresses from website visitors to build an email list

• How to automate your emails using GetResponse Autoresponder

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