How To Start A Newsletter From Scratch That Builds Community

In this video, I'm going to be walking you through how to set up your email newsletter and optimize it so that you get the absolute best open rates and click through rates. I'm going to be joined by one of our experts here at HubSpot, Pamela Bump. And then we're going to be taking a look at a real email that we've sent to our actual contacts so that you can see how we've optimized our content. Really lifting up the curtain here, you know, just giving away all the secrets. You know why? Because we want to see you succeed. And I love you. You specifically. Be sure to check out our email newsletter guide and lookbook in the description below, which will guide you through a lot of what we talk about. With all that said, let's hit it. Could you talk us through just what is a newsletter?

So an email newsletter is a tool that often marketers use when they want to send their content, whether it be blog posts or sales or deal opportunities to their customers or prospects via email.

That was the most concise description of a newsletter I think I've ever heard in my entire.

Thank you.

Could you talk to us about different kinds or types of newsletters?

Yeah. So I have helped the HubSpot blog develop their newsletter, so I would consider that more of an editorial content newsletter where the goal is to share blog posts, articles, things like that. There's also article newsletters such as the Hustle, which we all follow at HubSpot, and those are more like articles. So you read a synopsis of an article or a full article. Lastly, there are newsletters aimed to gain conversions or deals. So this might be a newsletter you get from a company that is trying to sell you a product with products in it, sales or even coupons. One important element is your subject line. The subject line is the first part that people are going to see when they're looking in their crowded inbox seeing tons of email. They're looking at your subject line. If you don't catch them, they're not going to open the email, they're not going to read it, they're not going to click on your content. You've lost them. You want your subject line to be attention grabbing. Another great element is the body. Once you get them in, you want to have some sort of great body text or hierarchy that really pulls them in. You want them to feel like they've opened an email and they're getting what you promised in the subject line. People are going to click towards the top. So put your high Priority stuff at the top. But also pay attention to clickability because if they see something very boring or unenticing for them at the top, they're not gonna click. And they might even leave your email too early. You want to nurture them into the email.

If I have an email subject line that's like big sale on Jamal's new cucumbers. And then I begin my email body with in 1993 my father told like that's the wrong thing to do because people aren't.

Don't do that, don't do that. Yeah, you'll want to jump into the cucumbers.

Give the people the cucumbers immediately.

Give the people the cucumb.

So let's actually go ahead and get started setting up a newsletter using the HubSpot CMS. How does that sound?

Yeah, sounds great.

Here we are inside of the HubSpot CMS. You can access email by going to up at the Top Marketing, then email. Let's say we wanted to start creating our newsletter from scratch.

Usually for most emails you're going to want to go for regular. Automation is more advanced. Once you get to this point where you might want to triggered emails or segmented emails or emailing with smart rules, that's when you would enter the automation space. But for now we'll just focus on regular.

Here you can choose from a whole bunch of different templates. Something else that's really cool is if you head over to Custom Dun Dun. You see over here we have Ridge Offer Email and Sonata. They actually came from the HubSpot Marketplace. So if you go over here to the little house looking thing, then to Asset Marketplace, then over to Templates, then email. Lo and behold, you can download as many different templates as you want. So HubSpot really gives you a lot of flexibility. So we're going to go ahead and use one of HubSpot's templates. Which one should we use? Pam?

Let's go with this one.

Newsletter 2 yeah, let's do it.

So basically this is a drag and drop format, which means that you can take items and drag them in if you'd like. If you don't like how that looks, you can also delete it. One of the first things you're going to want to do is determine what kind of content is going to be in your email. For this example, we can imagine that this starts with an offer or conversion opportunity. So we could say cucumber coupon and then you could add some sort of text like use promo code. You can also link your Text and your image. So if you click on this image, you can add links over here to have even more linkable opportunities.

Nice. There's a field here for alt text. How important is that?

Yes, that is very important. Imagine that you are looking at this email as a low vision person or a person who is legally blind and you need to use a screen reader. The screen reader will read the titles, the descriptions and also the alt text of the images. You're going to want to fill out that alt text. Giving the biggest highlights here with the the button.

That's where we're able to do our CTA is we can change this to cucumber.com I wonder if that's even a real domain. I bet whoever owns that domain is going to get some free traffic from this video.

Say you want to write to someone. Say you want to personalize things a bit. You can do this with HubSpot even without having an automated email. You are going to go to personalize and then you are going to to say contact first name and then you're going to want to pick a default value. Because if for Some reason the HubSpot software can't pull their name, you want them to be able to see something other than a null or a space and you have written a letter to them instead of just saying cucumbers for sale. Personalization is very important. We get a lot of emails from big companies every day. It feels very impersonal. It feels like they just want to sell to us. So when you personalize, it takes a wall kind of away from that. It feels like Pamela from HubSpot is sending you an email to Ashley. When you say hi Ashley versus hi name or don't even mention her name, it feels like you know the person a bit. You have learned about their Persona. And then when you preview, you can preview it as someone. So you want to preview it as someone named Ashley. You can see it says Ashley, there's cucumbers for sale. Wow. So Ashley can know about the cucumbers. Another important thing to point out while we're in the preview is that you can see the mobile optimized version. So here you can see that our headline is way too big.

Yeah. Not optimized for mobile.

It's not optimized for mobile, but that's why we have mobile previews. A growing amount of people are opening their emails on mobile. So that's very important. One more important thing to point out is your subject line. As I mentioned, the subject line is very, very important. You want it to be quick and clean but also enticing. Preview text is also optional. I would do it just in case people can see it, but keep in mind that some inboxes do not show preview text. So I would make this an enhancement of the subject line but not something that's required.

It seems like subscription type is a mandatory field. Why is that?

If you unsubscribe which it's required to have an unsubscribe button in your email Required by can spam GDPR to have an unsubscribe button in your email and it should be visible and accessible. IP and email delivery score might be impacted. You don't want that. You want people to be able to unsubscribe when they unsubscribe that subscription type is one of the things that helps HubSpot unsubscribe them for additional accessibility is you can go down here and go to customize and you can update your HTML. So the HTML email is very important to if some people with screen readers prefer to receive an email as HTML so there's less pictures and other issues clouding what they're reading that is helpful for them, but you will want to pull out some of the unnecessary code to make sure they have a good experience. So personalization tokens should work, but I would keep in mind that in some inboxes they may not. So it's up to you whether you keep them or not. You can also send yourself a test HTML email to make sure it works in your inbox and is still sending that email to Ashley or someone and if not it's showing the hi for social this is not going to link so you can pull these out and if you don't like what you've created you can also reset it and just go back to what the email was as basic HTML.

What do you think the right candidates is for an email newsletter?

It really depends on your Persona and what you're trying to accomplish with your email. If you are an editorial publication and you really want traffic more often would be would be important. So potentially a daily email. But if you're going to do a daily, give people the option to do a weekly as well. Daily can be a lot on someone's inbox and lower engagement rates can tend to happen if you send someone too many emails. On the other hand, if you're doing coupons or deals, you might only need a bi weekly or tri weekly cadence.

So I imagine some of that is both doing a little bit of market research for your industry and Then also doing some A B testing and figuring out what the right thing is. Yes, as we're building out this email, our email looked pretty awful. But for a pretty well optimized email, you can see, I think a lot of what you were mentioning about, you know, good practices in terms of eye catching, imagery, good waiting, a small amount of text with like a very clear cta. All that is kind of coming directly into play here. And of course we also have the unsubscribe or manage preferences at the bottom, which is not only necessary so that you don't get folks driving down your email open rate if they just no longer want to engage with it, it's also legally necessary and you could end up in big, big trouble. So be sure to include an unsubscribe link for this particular email. The subject line was how to create a product launch email outlines and templates. Of course, most of the content that we're sending as HubSpot is related to content marketing. Naturally it's going to be leaning more towards helpful how to that kind of stuff. Preview text, which we talked about earlier was ace your next launch and learn how to write the perfect product launch email with our tips and templates. So you can see that as you mentioned, it was an embellishment of that subject line to really kind of hook folks in and get them interested.

Yes, this is your analytics. What you can see is how your email performed. Open rate is the rate of people that opened your email compared to the amount of times it was sent. So unique opens are one person that opened the email, each individual person, and then total opens are the total. Then you'll have click rate. Click rate is the clicks based on the sends. You can also see click through rate, which is the clicks based on the open. So click rate will always be much smaller than click through rate. Click through rate and open rate can be impacted by Apple's iOS privacy protection, which can mark things as opens or not opens that should be marked as something different. Then you can go down and see additional metrics.

Yeah, okay, hold on. Who's the one person that was like, yo, this is spam?

That's always going to happen on emails. If you get someone marking you as spam spam, I wouldn't pay too much attention to it. Some people honestly just get frustrated by emails and they go on an unsubscribe binge. We've all done it, so no hostility towards that person. If they felt, you know, it's. It's just not for me. Whatever we're gonna find you.

We're gonna find. I bet it was Ashley.

Oh, Ashley. She didn't like the cucumbers.

No more cucumbers.

And then you'll look at your unsubscribe subscribes. We send to a very large list so we and we are always gaining subscribers. We are used to seeing a larger number of unsubscribes, but we're not too worried about that. Usually if your unsubscribe rate is more than 1 or 2%, you might want to start looking at things. Another thing, these are what I would kind of call vanity metrics. They aren't necessarily needed for huge decision making because it's going to vary on every email. But it's really helpful when determining how you're going to organize your emails and what content is really popular. This ranking here shows the top click links and you can see which links were most popular in the email. Spoiler. It's likely going to be that the links at the top are the most click links because people will click the most on the stuff at the top and then maybe veer off just naturally in emails. The longer the email, the less of a chance the last item is going to get a solid large amount of clicks. And that's just how the cookie essentially crumbles. One interesting thing to look at is the rate at which people glanced, skimmed and read the email. How many people were super engaged with my email, how many people were less so engaged but still paid attention to it, and how many people just kind of opened it up, scrolled through, said, okay, I'm not gonna go deep into this email and continued on with their day. I think this is a pretty optimized email. You usually will see red rates in the 50%, which is great. Sometimes you'll see it go down to 30 or 40 if the email is longer. And there's way more links. If your email is shorter, you might wanna see the red rate be a little bit bigger just because there's less email to engage with. So if they're not engaging with the whole email, that might be bit concerning. And then you'll see engagement rate over time. This is another thing spoiler. It's going to have higher engagement when it sends and then less over time. Email inboxes bill really, really quickly. And then another thing that you can see, which is the last kind of really interesting thing is who's opening your email and where.

Essentially I'm going to be honest with you, I'm horrified that we have this many people using Yahoo mail still in 2022. I'm I'm quite disappointed.

It's pretty interesting.

And there you have it, folks. As I said, be sure to check out the offer down below of our email newsletter guide and lookbook, which will walk you through everything that we just talked about in even more detail. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait for your newsletter to end up in my inbox so that I can hit Manage Preferences and say, yeah, change this from weekly to daily. Until that time I'll see you later.