How to create a newsletter people actually want to read

Let’s start here: how many unread emails do you have in your inbox? It’ll sound counterintuitive, but – trust us! – this is exactly where we need to begin.

Because newsletters are, in fact, a powerful marketing tool, and they’re even coming back into fashion (just think of the success of Substack). But they work in a sneaky way. In other words: while with a blog post you have to go looking for it, a newsletter is content that “comes to your house,” or rather reaches your (digital, of course) address and slips into your own private space.

This is exactly the point we come back to whenever we talk about how to create a newsletter. After all, plenty of companies fall into a strange delusion of omnipotence. They may think (rightly or wrongly) that they’re the “leader in sector X,” and that this entitles them to bombard the poor user with messages until they hit the Unsubscribe button.

We’re saying all this because, before creating a newsletter – that is, before writing it – there’s something far more important you need. And that’s a strategy. It’s mainly strategy that we want to talk about here, along with a few other tips on how to create and launch an effective newsletter.

Read on to see what we’ve put together for you.

The first step is defining a strategy

We’ve said it, and we’ll say it again: the first step is defining a strategy. If we start out by ‘borrowing’ random newsletter ideas here and there, without adapting them to your sector and your audience and without adding anything new, we’ve already lost.

Keep in mind – rightly so – that there’s no such thing as a perfect newsletter. There’s no single type (or strategy) of newsletter that works equally well for someone selling industrial bolts and someone running a colorful-socks e-commerce store. Every market sector and every target audience calls for a completely different approach. The same goes for consultants and/or freelancers.

Let’s look at a few examples.

If your brand is in the fashion space, your audience is probably looking for inspiration, new trends, style advice; or simply details on promotions and deals. It all depends on the type of audience and what you sell: maybe you offer basics, timeless essential pieces.

In that case, your buyers care little about the Paris runways or the latest extravagant trends. What they’re after is practicality, fabric quality; they want to know how to wash that white T-shirt without shrinking it on the first wash, or how to put together three pieces for the office without losing their minds in the morning.

See why generic “style advice” as an argument tends to fall flat? The type of content you send by email needs to be really, truly targeted and really, truly useful. Not useful in some abstract sense, but useful to the people who buy from you.

So, before you even write the email, you need to map out your audience – taking your sector into account. It’s about getting inside your customer’s head and understanding what their real, everyday need is in relation to what you sell. That way you avoid ending up as the pushy salesperson and instead design a standing appointment (by email) that people are glad to show up for.

Types of newsletters – which one should you choose for your business?

Once you’ve calibrated the content to your target’s real needs, you need to choose the right structure. Needless to say: not every newsletter should take the same form. To keep things simple, here we’ll narrow the main models down to three broad categories:

The editorial newsletter

With an editorial newsletter you’re not selling anything, at least not directly. Instead, you offer guides, insights, solutions to specific problems or trends in your industry. That’s why it’s the perfect choice if you offer services, consulting, or sell complex products that require a considered decision.

The psychological mechanism is simple: if today you solve a small problem for your reader for free, tomorrow, when they need a professional and have to reach for their wallet, they’ll remember you. You’ve built authority and trust, which are the foundation of every sale.

The commercial newsletter

If you run an online store or sell physical products, this is your bread and butter. We’re talking about product launches, exclusive discounts, flash sales.

Careful, though: being commercial doesn’t mean you have to “squeeze” the reader. If 90% of what you send is just a run of photos and a Buy now button, your open rate will crash. Even sales need a bit of context, some behind-the-scenes detail, or a story that creates an emotional connection. Think of yourself as a trusted personal shopper, and act accordingly.

The digest newsletter

You know that super-informed friend or colleague who picks out the most interesting articles of the week and sends them your way – maybe even with a comment attached? Well, the digest newsletter does exactly that, only better.

It’s about doing a curation job (so-called content curation), gathering the best links, news, videos or useful tools for your target audience – all accompanied by an explanation or a comment.

It’s a godsend for anyone tired of drowning in the web’s endless flow of content. With a digest you offer immense value: curated insight, and time saved for people who want to stay up to date.

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Great, now the strategic part is locked down. We’ve figured out what to say, who to say it to, and in what format. Time to get our hands dirty with the technology.

The tools you’ll need

Now – as you can probably guess – you can’t do email marketing using your personal inbox (say, by putting a hundred customers in bcc, i.e. blind carbon copy). If you do, besides risking privacy fines that would make your hair stand on end, half your emails will land straight in spam. Yikes.

To do things properly you need an email marketing platform (also called an ESP). The good news is you don’t need to spend a fortune to get started. The bad news is that, if you pick the wrong tool, it could actually slow down your newsletter’s growth.

So let’s walk through how to find your way, without losing your mind.

Free tools for a zero-cost newsletter

If you’re just starting out (meaning: zero budget, your list still has just a handful of subscribers, you run a small operation), the watchword is minimalism. You need simple tools that work well. Here are two platforms offering excellent free plans to start testing with:

MailerLite

If you hate technical complications, MailerLite is perfect for you. It has a very generous free plan (typically letting you manage up to a thousand subscribers without spending a euro) and an interface so clean it’s genuinely – and we mean genuinely – accessible to everyone. The email builder is a drag-and-drop tool of disarming simplicity. You couldn’t ask for more.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

The ideal choice if you don’t have a huge number of contacts but want to send a lot of emails. Unlike other tools, Brevo’s free plan doesn’t cap the number of subscribers, but it does cap the number of emails sent per day (around three hundred). On top of that, its servers are based in Europe, which makes privacy management much smoother from day one.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is perhaps the best-known email marketing platform, even among people who are just starting out. Over time, though, its free plans have shrunk considerably, while the platform itself has become quite complex – almost overkill if all you need to do is get started. It’s probably not the ideal tool for beginners; but if you already have Mailchimp set up at your company and you’re using it well, feel free to stay put: it does its job just fine.

Advanced tools to scale your strategy

At a certain point, if you’re doing things right, your list will grow. You’ll pass the threshold of a thousand, two thousand, five thousand subscribers. In short: the free tool will start to feel too small – and that’s a good thing, because it means the marketing is working.

Once the newsletter becomes a serious asset, you need automation, advanced segmentation (separating big spenders from customers who only buy during sales) and precise tracking. This is where you level up:

ActiveCampaign

The undisputed king of automation for small and medium businesses. It’s not just a tool for sending newsletters – it’s a genuine sales engine. It lets you build flows like: “If the customer opens email X but doesn’t click the link, wait two days and send them email Y with a testimonial.” It costs money and takes some learning to set up properly, but if your business is well-structured it pays for itself very quickly.

ConvertKit

Built for content creators, it’s perfect if you’ve chosen the path of the editorial newsletter or if you sell info-products and consulting. It’s focused almost entirely on text and on visual cleanliness (no heavy, graphics-laden emails that end up in Gmail’s “Promotions” tab). It’s a powerful, precise tool, very focused on converting readers into paying customers.

How to grow your newsletter subscriber list

You’ve got your newsletter, okay – but you need an audience. Or rather, you need subscribers. Often, whoever runs a company and works with newsletters makes the mistake of relying only on the email addresses already sitting in their database.

Things like: old customers, current customers, people who emailed years ago just to ask for information… To be clear, we don’t mean to dismiss that – that’s an interesting audience too.

However, a newsletter works when subscribers have deliberately chosen to sign up. That can happen, for example, because they found your website and want to stay updated (so they leave their email in the right box); because they discovered you on social media; or – and this is the most interesting part – because you offered them something in exchange.

Let’s look at all three scenarios below.

The signup box on your website

Your website is your main storefront, and it’s exactly where the most important battle plays out. A newsletter signup box needs to be visible, appealing, and placed strategically: on the homepage, halfway through a blog post, or via a smart pop-up that only appears when the user is about to leave the site.

The most important thing is that the box be connected to your email marketing platform, so everything runs automatically. This is often the point where business owners get stuck – and it’s exactly where a web agency (like No Digital Brain!) comes in, handling the implementation of whichever email service you prefer without a hitch.

Social media

The best way to use social media today is to use it to drive people onto your email list. Because social media is, in a sense, borrowed space. Your contact list, on the other hand, is entirely yours. And that makes all the difference.

Of course, you shouldn’t just limit yourself to asking your followers, in stories and posts, to subscribe to your newsletter. The ideal approach is to create curiosity. For example, you could show short teasers of what you write by email, or tell part of an anecdote and close by saying it’ll all be covered in full in the next email.

Your social followers need to feel that exclusive things happen in the newsletter – that it holds the best content, the kind you don’t publish anywhere else.

The lead magnet

Nobody hands over their email address – which is a piece of private space – just for the fun of it. They do it if they get immediate value in return. This incentive is called a lead magnet (literally: a magnet for contacts).

It needs to be a free digital piece of content, easy to consume, that solves a specific problem for your target audience. A few concrete examples? If you sell B2B services or consulting, it could be a PDF checklist, a ready-to-use Excel spreadsheet, or a short practical guide. If instead you run an e-commerce store, the classic lead magnet is a welcome discount code (say, 10% or 15% off) on the first purchase.

With the right incentive, you’ll finally be able to grow your contact list. And that’s exactly what guarantees your newsletter’s effectiveness.

Privacy and GDPR, for a legally compliant newsletter

Now there’s just one last hurdle left, and it’s often the one that causes the most anxiety: privacy regulation. GDPR compliance is, however, an essential step if you want to protect yourself and avoid significant administrative fines.

Basically, to manage a contact list in line with European regulations, you need to follow three fundamental rules:

• obtain explicit consent
• use double opt-in
• make unsubscribing simple

So, what does this actually mean in practice? When a user enters their email on your site, there must be a specific checkbox for marketing, and it must not be pre-selected. In other words, the user has to take a deliberate action to express their consent.

After signing up on the site, though, it’s important that the user receive an automatic email containing a confirmation link. This is the double opt-in, which serves as proof of consent but also verifies that the email address actually exists.

Finally, every communication must always include a clear, working link that lets the user unsubscribe from the list at any time, on their own, with a single click.

Keep in mind that complying with privacy regulations, besides being a legal obligation, is also a mark of transparency and professionalism toward your customers. Put simply: it “earns you points” in their eyes. So it’s never something to underestimate.

Set up your newsletter with No Digital Brain

As you’ve probably gathered, creating a company newsletter takes planning that combines strategic skills, writing ability, and precise technical setup.

Every step – from choosing the software, to integrating signup forms on the site, to managing automated flows – needs to be coordinated to produce concrete business results.

If you’re looking for a web agency to handle the entire technical and strategic side, without making you waste time on complex configurations or code issues, that’s exactly what we’re here for.

At No Digital Brain we support small and medium-sized businesses both in building the tool from scratch and in optimizing it. We connect the signup forms on your site, configure the ideal sending platform for your needs, and make sure the entire infrastructure is automated, secure, and GDPR-compliant. Meanwhile, you can focus on running your business.à.