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Starting your digital newsletter
Advertisement feature by Danielle Skinner, Digital Marketer at Aspect IT

Every business should keep in touch with their customers. Social media is the most popular method but newsletters are still widely used.

Here are our top tips for creating and sending digital newsletters, a low-cost alternative to printing.

Before you begin: Plan your style, content and how often you will send your newsletter. Make sure you will have regular content and will commit to your schedule of sending it.

Get yourself on an emailing platform: You’ll need a method of sending your digital newsletter, so get set up on an email platform. We recommend MailChimp, Send In Blue or Zoho Campaigns because they offer free subscriptions plans.

Get your list of emails and grow it: You need to add all your email addresses into the emailing platform. You also need to grow your mailing list. Here are some ideas to help grow your mailing list:

• Offer a small discount if they sign up

• Have a subscribe box on your website; how are people going to know you have a newsletter if you don’t advertise it?

• Promote it through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social media channel and tell them what sort of things you will include

• Add the subscribe link to your standard email footer

Look up the legalities of sending emails: You need to make sure your newsletter abides by all the rules that protect yourself and others from breaking the law. Here are some of the laws in place:

• You need your recipient’s permission to send emails to them

• Include an unsubscribe link at the bottom to allow the recipient to have a choice if they want to continue receiving your emails

• Indicate who you are, what you’re selling and what promotions and conditions there are

Keep it short and sweet: Just get to the point and customers will be more interested in reading your newsletter.

Headers: Having headers helps the text to be more readable and breaks down the text. It gives the recipient an overview what that specific section is about.

Include images: Images brighten up the email and break down the text. ‘A picture speaks a thousand words’.

Add in a ‘Call to action’: This allows you to link the appropriate page in the text to take customers straight there.

Test your email before you hit send: Always send the newsletter to yourself first and check for spelling errors, grammatical errors or hyperlinks that don’t work.