Emailing tutorial: creating a newsletter that works

Emailing is one of the marketing levers that converts the most, provided that the right practices are put in place. The reason why emailing performs so well is simple: subscribers are often committed to 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 that generates few unsubscribes isn't easy, but it's perfectly possible by following the steps detailed below in our tutorial on email marketing. The key lies in two points: measuring your statistics (key KPIs for email marketing) and continually improving good practice. We're going to take a closer look at these two fundamentals here.

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Email open rates and click-through rates in 2016-2017

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

Definition of performance indicators

• Open rate: Number of emails opened/Number of successful emails x 100
  The open rate is calculated in relation to the number of emails that arrive in the inbox and not in relation to the number of emails sent. It reflects the level of relevance between the subject of the email and what the recipient is expecting.
  
  
• 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, positioning of CTAs.
  
  
• 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 the content (offers, articles, messages) in relation to the recipient's needs and context.
  
  
• Unsubscribe rate: Number of unsubscribes/Number of successful emails x 100
  The unsubscribe rate can be linked to a number of factors: fatigue, unwanted email, too high a frequency, etc. This rate decreases over time if you start with an imported contact base and stabilises 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). NPAIs are very high if you buy an email base whose origin you don't know. On the other hand, they are very low if your audience subscribes to your newsletter by itself.
  
  
• Spam rate: Number of complaints/Number of emails sent x 100
  Forced subscription to a newsletter can be costly for its author. Messaging systems are becoming increasingly impervious to unwanted emails and Internet users are not doing spammers any favours. Since spam filters are shared, if several recipients designate you as a spammer, it is highly likely that you will be blacklisted very quickly.

Average key indicators in France and worldwide

Set your course using the average indicators observed by various organisations specialising in email marketing:

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

To monitor 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. Optimise the HTML code of the email

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 that works well:

2. Look after the look of the email: 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 be enhancing your brand image.

3. Work on the subject line

The subject line has a big 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 they are going to read.

4. Work on the body of the email

Here are the main points to check to optimise the click-through rate 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 there are, 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 is not completely clean, then 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 the emails from your domain. This will be all the better for deliverability and the reputation of your domain name.
For more expert users, it is also advisable to customise the routing of emails from a specific server (with a dedicated IP address). This allows you to control the entire deliverability chain.

6. Segment your contacts

As far as possible, don't send the same email to all your contacts. It's better to segment your audience so that you can send more relevant emails. Your KPIs will soar!

Download the white paper on Sales Intelligence 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 9am to 10am, for example). This means that 40% of the e-mails opened and clicks made will be within the first 3 hours of the campaign being sent. High-traffic B2B sites tend to send emails early in the morning and at the end of the day. In BtoC, the opposite is true, with emails sent when their audience is available (weekends, between midday and 2 a.m., evenings).

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MailChimp, Brevo (formerly SendinBlue), Sarbacane. What should you choose?

Dozens of tools exist for sending your newsletter to the Moon, but not all of them deliver what they promise. Choose a tool with a good reputation. A good way of finding 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 an initial idea. Then compare email marketing software according to the criteria that make sense to you:

• Automatic cleaning of contact databases
• Responsive email editor
• Import and export contacts
• Ability to create landing pages, forms and pop-ups for your website
• Autoresponder to send automatic emails
• Workflow to automatically tag your contacts
• Integration with your CRM
• etc.

Price is also a very important variable. All emailing software has volume pricing: either per number of emails sent or per number of subscribers. Choose the most economical pricing option:

• if you have a small number of subscribers but send very frequently, then opt for a cost per subscriber;
  
  
• if you have a lot of subscribers but your sending frequency is low, then opt for a cost per email.