Ultimate Guide to Creating an Email Newsletter Checklist
If you’re left in charge of creating an email newsletter FROM SCRATCH, you’re really left with the ultimate balancing act. You are left to worry about creating copy, proofreading it, coming up with compelling Calls To Action, making sure the email fits all the different forms and factors of the variable devices a viewer can use to open up the email. That’s not even half of it. You’re still left with coming up with a subject line, some preview text, and making sure after all the hard work that you don’t get caught in the stupid spam filter.
So clearly, CLEARLY, you have a lot to do. In fact, you’ve been told about an entire paragraph of tasks that are part of the standard operating procedure when coming up with an email newsletter, and there are still some things left that you have no idea on. It’s for that reason why it may be best to create a checklist that can simply follow along.
First Step
The first step is to figure out what is the goal of your newsletter. There are thousands if not millions of different kinds of newsletters, written by all different kinds of companies, for different reasons, for different people. Your job, before you begin, is to figure out the purpose of your own newsletter. It could be anything from capturing leads, to selling products. It just needs to be something rather than nothing.
Second Step
The second step is to gather your content. Gathering content isn’t all that difficult, and there are two main methods of doing it. Actively finding content is going out and actually hunting for content you think would fit well with your newsletter. Passively finding content is a lot simpler, and it involves recognizing when you’ve stumbled upon a piece of content that will work for your newsletter.
Third Step
This is where you design your template. You don’t really need to be too nitpicky about this, at this point. Designing your template is all about just getting a rough idea of what your newsletter will look like, and where certain parts will be put. It’s really just eying everything real quick to make sure it’ll fit. Of course, it sounds easy but you also have to keep in mind that your template should work for various devices, and not just on your own.
Fourth Step
This is where things start becoming solid. What is meant by that is simple, as you’ve now got the entire template set up, Here you set the size of the email because unfortunately, they don’t size themselves.
Fifth Step
Add your body content here. Whatever is the main bulk of communication you want to get across to your users, this is the part where you implement that onto the email. This is the main body of your email, therefore you have to make sure it is perfect. You can even send it to a coworker to make sure it’s all good.
Sixth Step
The best email campaigns are the ones that work. It just so happens to be that all the ones that work are the ones that are most personalized. This is the part where you go back through everything you’ve come up with, but mainly the body of the email, and make sure that it’s segmented and personalized to the perfect extent.
Seventh Step
This is a part that we’ve actually mentioned in the intro paragraph, and it’s the part where you come up with a subject line. The reason subject lines are super important is because they are the actual package in which your email is wrapped. If your package isn’t enticing, it will be looked over in favor of something that’s more enticing. That’s why you personalize and customize the subject line.
Eighth Step
At this point, you deserve congratulations because your email is done. Unfortunately, it really isn’t. See, many things can go wrong when trying to open up an email and two of those things are: images not loading, and problems with HTML. This is why you come up with Alt text and Plain text that will be there in place of images or HTML if either of them fails.
Ninth Step
Again, you were finished by the seventh step really. What are you doing here? Well, you need to make sure your entire email checks out legally. What does that mean? It means you need to be aware of CAN-SPAM and GDPR. CAN-SPAM is the very bottom part of your email which gives receivers to be able to unsubscribe from your list and is legally required to be there. GDPR is a law passed in 2018, and its main point is to make sure email campaigns and newsletters are only sent to those people who opt-in for them. It’s your job to make sure of that.
Tenth Step
This is the tenth step, and it doesn’t really need to be. This step can be left as the tenth, or it can be extended forward to the next 100 steps. The point from here on out basically is to basically test everything possible. Make sure you test everything including the browser, device, email providers, etc. Basically, make sure everything works everywhere.
Eleventh Step
The second to last step is to send out your email! Congratulations for finally being able to complete the task you started off on, which seems so long ago now. No one said making an email newsletter was going to be easy, and actually, your job isn’t done yet.
The final thing to do is check up on the data you receive after you send the emails out. From there on, you analyze the data you compile, and then iterate changes slowly to get better and better results.