You’re sitting around a conference room, trying to figure out how to best engage your leads and customers, sell more products, or just “stay top-of-mind” for your target audience, and someone decides there’s a solution that can solve all of those problems at once: an email newsletter.

Suddenly, you are “volunteered” to do it and suddenly you’re thrust into the world of newsletter marketing. You’ve got to make sure that open and clickthrough rates don’t dip. Oh, and the first one needs to go out tomorrow.

I’ve been in that situation before, and I was terrified. Even though e-newsletters are one of the most common types of emails to send, they are actually some of the hardest to do right.

In this post, we’ll teach you how to create an email newsletter your customers will enjoy reading. And if you love what you’ve read and want some extra help creating a newsletter people will read and enjoy, you can check out our free email marketing tools.

What is newsletter marketing?

Newsletter marketing is the use of newsletters to build your brand and foster a relationship with your consumers.

Email newsletters help establish your brand as an authority in its industry or on a relevant topic because it allows your business to send important information directly to your consumers via their inbox.

What makes a good newsletter?

HubSpot staff writer Erica Santiago is subscribed to quite a few newsletters and used to manage the HubSpot Marketing Daily Newsletter before it was folded into our new Masters in Marketing newsletter. 

So, she knows a lot about email newsletters. 

“The Marketing Daily Newsletter was such a huge success for years because it provided our audience with actionable marketing advice as well as updates on the latest trends,” she says. 

Santiago explains, “The Masters in Marketing newsletter is also appealing to our audience because it provides insight directly from marketing experts via exclusive conversations and interviews.”

According to Santiago, a good newsletter consists of unique, relevant information and/or actionable advice delivered in a more personable way.

“Our newsletter has a very casual tone like you’re chatting with a friend or like someone you know sent you some information they thought you’d find interesting,” she says. 

Her favorite newsletter outside of HubSpot is Bad Brain by music journalist Ashley Reese. 

“Ashley Reese’s husband tragically died of cancer shortly after their wedding,” she says. “So her newsletter is her sharing how she’s navigating grief and how her worldview has really shifted since then. She’s also a music journalist and super tapped into pop culture, so she sprinkles a bit of that perspective in as well.”

“Her mind is unlike any other, and she provides information and a perspective I can’t find anywhere else, which makes her newsletter so valuable to me,” Santiago says. 

So, in short, a good newsletter consists of:

• Relevant information and/or actionable advice
• Unique perspectives and insight 
• Friendly, approachable, and personable tone

Want to ace your new email newsletter project or rejuvenate an old one? Below are 10 things you need to do. And if you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some awesome email newsletter examples you can check out.

Where do you start? Before you get started creating an email newsletter, look at some examples in (and outside of) your industry. We’ve compiled a list of dozens of our favorite email newsletters into an ultimate lookbook.

Image Source

As a subscriber, wouldn’t that be awesome? You’d go in with open eyes knowing exactly who you’ll be receiving email from, what they’ll be sending you, and how often they’ll be sending it.

As a marketer, having this information up front will help diminish your unsubscribe and spam rates as well.

6. Get creative with email subject lines.

Even if your subscribers sign up for your emails, there’s no guarantee that they will open your emails once they get them in their inbox.

Many marketers try increasing familiarity with their subscribers by keeping the subject line the same each day, week, or month that they send it.

But let’s face it, those subject lines get old for subscribers — and fast. Why? Because there’s no incentive from the subject line to click on that specific email right this instant.

A better approach would be to try to have a different, creative, engaging subject line for each newsletter you send.

One company that does this really well is Thrillist. Here’s a collection of email newsletters I’ve received recently:

I’ve opened every single one of these because of the company’s subject lines. Even though I know that these emails are coming into my inbox every morning, the subject lines are what entice me to click.

If you need help with your email newsletter subject lines, check out this recipe.

7. Pick one primary call-to-action.

Okay, part of what makes a newsletter a newsletter is that you’re featuring multiple pieces of content with multiple calls-to-action (CTAs). But, that doesn’t mean you should let those CTAs share equal prominence.

Instead, let there be one head honcho CTA — just one main thing that you would like your subscribers to do. The rest of the CTAs should be “in-case-you-have-time” options.

Whether it’s simply to click through to see a blog post or just to forward the email to a friend, make it super simple for your subscribers to know what you want them to do.

Check out the Scott’s Cheap Flights email newsletter below, which was promoting their newest travel deals.

It’s got a photo to draw you in and chock-full of information … but it’s also pretty obvious what they want you to do: purchase the premium plan for exclusive travel deals.

By placing this CTA above all the other pieces of information, Scott’s Cheap Flights increases the chance that their email recipients will click on it.

8. Keep design and copy minimal.

Like we said before, a newsletter can easily feel cluttered because of its nature. The trick for email marketers to look uncluttered revolves around two things: concise copy and enough white space in the design.

Concise copy is key — because you don’t actually want to have your subscribers hang out and read your email all day.

You want to send them elsewhere (your website or blog, for instance) to actually consume the whole piece of content. Concise copy gives your subscribers a taste of your content — just enough that they want to click and learn more.

White space is key in email newsletters because it helps visually alleviate the cluttered feel, and on mobile, makes it much easier for people to click the right link.

Look to Schwab’s investing insights newsletter to see how this should be done. The design is clean, with just one thumbnail next to a paragraph of text, a link to read the article, and plenty of white space. The design feels uncluttered and easy to read.

9. Make sure images have alt text.

Given that visual content is incredibly important to the rest of your marketing activities, it’d make sense that you’d want to include them in your emails … right?

Right. But email’s a little bit trickier. Most of the time, people won’t have images enabled, so you’ve got to make sure your images have one essential component: alt text.

Alt text is the alternative text that appears when images aren’t loaded in an email. This is especially important if your CTAs are images — you want to make sure people are clicking even without the image enabled.

Each email marketing program is different, but here is one tutorial for adding alt text to email.

10. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe.

This seems kinda counter-intuitive, but it’s key if you want to maintain an active, engaged subscriber list. Don’t use weird language like “Alter your communication with us.”

Don’t hide an unsubscribe button behind an image without alt text. Besides keeping your list healthy, having a clear unsubscribe process will help ensure your email isn’t marked SPAM before it hits the rest of your list’s inbox.

Take a look at charity: water’s newsletter below to see how to do this right. The link to unsubscribe is bolded and capitalized, making it really easy for you to take action on it (if you wanted).

No footer hunting required to uncover where the heck you can change your email settings.

11. Test, test, test.

I know I just listed out nine things you should do to make sure you’re doing email newsletters right, but you’ve also got to find out what works for your company and your list.

Just like different cultures of people prefer different things, different groups of email subscribers prefer different things.

So use these email newsletter best practices as a jumping off point … and then experiment to find your secret sauce. Here are a few things you can try:

Short, Funny Subject Lines

All of your subject lines should be on the short side. (They work better that way.) But have you ever tried infusing a little humor into your copy?

It could put a smile on your recipients’ faces — and potentially improve your open and clickthrough rates. Below’s a really funny subject line example from MasterClass:

This clever F-word subject line was used to introduce their new line of fashion-centered classes with Anna Wintour.

CTA Copy & Design

Maybe your readers like loud, bright colors on your CTA — or maybe drab, bland ones are the way to go.

Maybe they prefer really fun, excitable, action-oriented copy — or maybe a simple “click here” works. Definitely test out your CTA language and copy to see what resonates.

As a good example to follow, Etsy has multiple CTAs in its email newsletter, but the way that they use color and copy makes them seem very natural and easy-to-read.

No Images

Most of the emails featured in this post have lots of gorgeous, compelling images … but that doesn’t mean you need them in your emails.Try stripping away images in favor of seriously well-written copy.

Mobile Version

More and more people are surfing the web and checking their emails on mobile devices, so you should make sure that whatever design you work with is both visually pleasing and functional.

This will ensure that your mobile email is engaging to both desktop and mobile users.

Want to learn more about this? Here’s a detailed guide that walks you through how to optimize your email for mobile devices.

Sender Name

Another way to get a subscriber’s attention is to send an email with a name they recognize — whether it’s their own or a brand leader they’d recognize.

This email from Gartner used the subscriber’s first name in the subject line to grab their attention. If you have a company mascot that’s widely recognized, you could test sending a newsletter from them.

Want to start designing but aren’t sure how? Use a template! Check out our long list of effective email templates that are free or very affordable.

1. Blog Posts

Linking to blog posts will drive readers to your website and can establish trust and authority with your brand by relaying important, relevant information. 

“I’m subscribed to a lot of bloggers’ newsletters,” Santiago says. “So, of course, they often include links to posts and I value their insight enough to click and read.”

2. How-To Guides

Do you remember what I said about actionable advice? Well, a how-to-guide can be exactly that! Audiences love to learn, so providing a relevant how-to guide in your newsletter can be very beneficial to your brand.

For example, if your industry is finance, a how-to guide on building a strong savings account or how to navigate buying a house would be useful to your audience. 

“I’m really into fashion, so I’m always looking up how-to guides on revamping my wardrobe or dressing up for warmer and cooler months,” Santiago says. 

3. Discounts and Promotions

Who doesn’t love to here about opportunities to save money at their favorite stores? If you’re a retail brand, consider including lates sales, discounts, and promotions in your newsletter. 

Your audience will want to stay subscribed so they can keep track of hte latest deals from your business.

4. Contests and Giveaways

Like I said, people love a chance to save money. And what better to save money than to win a giveaway or contest? Think about fun ways to entice your audience into joining a contest. 

Maybe you can giveaway an exclusive item or meet-and-greet with an influencer? Whatever your contest or giveaway is, include it in your newsletter. 

5. User-generated Content.

“I used to manage a newsletter for a local TV news station I worked for and we would always encourage our audience send us fun videos or photos os weather of phenomena or local Florida happenings,” Santiago says. “It definitely provided an incentive for them to subscribe to our newsletter because they wanted to see if their submission made the cut. 

6. Testimonials

If consumers are taking to your social media or website to praise your product or service, considering using those in your newsletter.

Consumers want to hear from real people, so they’ll love to see a real person praising the quality of your brand, product, or service.  

7. Video Content

Videos are known to boost engagement and conversion rates, so adding video content to your newsletter can generate more interest. Plus, video is a great way to show your subscribers how to use a product or service. 

8. Industry News

This is a great option if your target audience consists of those who are interested in the mechanics of your industry.

For example, if you’re a company that manufactures specialized equipment for industry professionals, including news about shifts in the business would provide added value alongside your product. 

9. Company Updates and Announcements

Your loyal consumers will want to know what’s going on with your company. Do you have a new location opening? Are your collaborating with another organization that could impact (or improve) the customer’s experience? 

That could be great information to include in your newsletter. 

10. Webinars

A newsletter is an efficient way to invote your consumers to an upcoming webinar you’re hosting. 

Now that you know how to put together your newsletter, it’s time to brainstorm what content your readers will enjoy. What you choose to offer will depend on your business, industry, and target audience.

If your website already has a blog, consider sending out a content roundup of your best articles and videos. Educational content is also valuable.

Sending a how-to guide in your newsletter can help establish your brand as the authority on a given topic and provide readers with content that is most relevant to their interests.

Get your subscriber list engaged with contests or scour your social media channels for user-generated content featuring your brand. Customer promotion adds social proof to your brand, making it more trustworthy.

Email Newsletter Best Practices

Once you’re ready to put together your newsletter, be sure to follow the above steps. Here are some best practices to guide your efforts, regardless of your newsletter’s formatting:

1. Keep things short and sweet.

When making a newsletter, don’t overwhelm people with too much text or imagery. Level things out. Even if you choose a photo-less newsletter, keep your message quick and to the point so the email cuts to the chase and grabs attention the whole time.

2. Make your content valuable.

No one wants to open an email with a bunch of advertisements in it. So, include gems of wisdom, tips, and helpful blog posts along the way so the reader feels like they’re actually learning something.

This will make the subscription feel much more valuable to them.

3. Always test your emails.

It’s embarrassing when a link doesn’t work or a design aspect looks wonky. So be sure to send test emails to yourself and a colleague who can give you helpful feedback.

Check them on both a computer and a smartphone inbox so you can confirm that both the mobile and desktop designs look good.

4. Don’t skip A/B testing.

Aside from testing emails to make sure the design looks as it should and all links work, you’ll want to experiment with A/B testing. Performing A/B tests will help you determine the types of emails your audience prefers.

You can also use A/B testing to see what works or doesn’t when it comes to CTA placement and other details.

5. Make it mobile-friendly.

With more users checking their email on mobile devices, it’s imperative that your newsletter is mobile-friendly.

Nearly 60% of emails are opened on mobile devices. One way to ensure your emails display properly is by using a responsive email template. HubSpot’s drag and drop email templates are responsive by default and a great option if looking for an easy solution.

6. Monitor email frequency.

Another aspect to pay attention to is how many emails you’re sending and how often. Sending too many emails can cause recipients to unsubscribe.

Send an Email Newsletter Your Subscribers Will Love

Email newsletters are something we’re all familiar with, yet it can be challenging to create a successful one for your own brand. Use the examples above for inspiration and create an email newsletter that delights your subscribers.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in September 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

You already know your Facebook insights are crucial for nudging your Facebook marketing strategy in the right direction. Facebook analytics give you the performance numbers you need to:

• Optimize your ad spend
• Improve the reach of your organic posts
• Give statistics you can report to stakeholders
• …And more

But Facebook bid adios to its native Facebook analytics tool (and the Facebook audience insights tool) in 2021. How do you get your Facebook analytics now? This article will tell you everything you need to know to measure your Facebook performance and get valuable insights.

⚠️ Note: You need to have a Facebook Business Page for your small business or a Facebook profile in professional mode to access Facebook analytics and insights. Personal Facebook accounts don’t serve the marketing function and thus have little to no insights data available.

What’s the difference between Facebook analytics and Facebook insights?

First things first: What’s the difference between Facebook analytics and Facebook insights?

• Facebook analytics refer to the raw numbers, data, and performance statistics
• Facebook insights refer to the learnings you derive from the above analytics

For example, let’s say you collate all your best-performing Facebook posts by finding all the content with the most engagement and reach. Here, you’re using Facebook analytics (likes, comments, shares, impressions, etc.) to determine which posts qualify as ‘best-performing’. After this collection, suppose you spot a pattern where most top performing posts were user-generated content. This is a Facebook insight you derived from your analytics.

Facebook offers raw analytics and some insights via its native tools. But you can also use third-party social media analysis tools to take a deeper dive into your performance metrics.

Meta sunsetted its Facebook analytics tool to consolidate data from its other networks (like Instagram) all in one place. Now, you can view your Facebook Page performance in four ways inside Meta:

1. Professional dashboard

2. Meta business suite (only for Facebook Pages)

3. Meta ads manager (only if you run Facebook ads)

4. Facebook group insights (if you have a Facebook group)

1: Professional dashboard

The Professional dashboard is available for creators with professional mode on their Facebook profiles turned on and for Facebook Page insights. It contains simple surface-level Facebook analytics. If you’re looking for some quick insight into how your Facebook marketing is going, this is the best place to look at.

Inside the “Professional dashboard,” you’ll find an “Insight” tab containing four tabs:

1. Home: This section is a basic performance overview of your Page or profile for the past 28 days. You can see key metrics like overall page posts, total reach, page views, engagement, new followers, new page likes, recent content, and some basic info about your audience.

2. Your Page/Profile: Insights under this tab contain post reach, engagement, new followers, unfollows, and total interactions (likes, comments, shares, views, clicks) for the past 28 days.

3. Content: This page contains the public posts you’ve shared in the past 90 days (or you can filter for the past 7, 28, or 60 days) and how they’re performing individually.

4. Audience: Here, you can see fundamental demographic data (gender, age, and location) about the audience interacting with your Facebook Page or profile.

The professional dashboard is excellent if you simply want to do a quick flip-through of your Facebook posts’ performance. It’s not the most in-depth source of information, but it can get the ball rolling and is handy when you’re short on time.

It’s best to visit the professional dashboard regularly to stay in the loop on how your posts are performing and what audience demographics are interacting with your Page/profile.

2: Meta business suite

Meta business suite replaced Facebook analytics to become the source of native Facebook page insights. Facebook profiles with professional mode turned on don’t work inside Meta business suite at the time of writing this article.

The Meta business suite helps with many things (like unifying your inbox, scheduling content on Facebook and Instagram, etc.) including extracting in-depth Facebook analytics and insights into your organic and paid content on the platform.

As soon as you log in to your Meta business suite, you’ll find an “Insights” section on the left menu. Within insights, eight tabs contain extensive and in-depth info on your Facebook performance:

1. Overview: This subsection contains the basic info on your Facebook Page insights. It includes daily and cumulative insights into how much reach you’ve gotten from your Facebook posts. The same tab also breaks down the reach numbers into 3-minute views, 1-minute views, minutes viewed, and content interactions on the X-axis and from followers & non-followers on the Y-axis.

2. Plan: Here, Facebook helps you set goals and complete basic tasks it recommends to set yourself up for success — like the number of times you should post, setting up admins, etc. It’s a good tab to monitor in the beginning to understand Meta’s expectations and the features it offers.

3. Results: This section helps you understand Facebook reach, Page views, follows, and ad performance over your selected timeline. It’s excellent for monitoring whether your Facebook analytics are increasing or decreasing over time. You can also come here to export these graphs for reporting to stakeholders.

4. Audience: When Meta shut down Facebook Audience Insights, it didn’t eradicate it completely. Instead, Meta merged it into the business suite so you can continue to extract the granular details about your followers on Facebook. This tab contains:

• Trends: This tab shows metrics such as how your followers are increasing or decreasing, returning viewers, engaged followers over the timeline you’ve set. It also shows when you should post on Facebook by displaying the your audience’s most active times.
• Segments: Your target audience is divided into people who engage, follow, and message your Facebook Page. You can get insights into all these individual segments.
• Demographics: This is where you can see a breakdown of your audience’s demographic data — their age, gender, and location.
• Potential audience: Here, you can add filters on who your ideal customer already is (where do they live? What’s their age? and more) and understand the number of people you can reach via your Facebook Page.

⚠️ Note: The number of people Facebook shares within the potential audience umbrella is an estimate. Don’t take it at face value.

5. Messaging: If you practice any form of customer service via your Facebook Page, this section is a goldmine. You can see how many people contacted you via direct messages (DMs), admins data, number of people who were returning contacts, your response time, and how many of your Facebook conversations converted into booked appointments (if you use that feature).

6. Benchmarking: This is the place where you can compare your Facebook performance to businesses that look like yours. You can either add your industry and evaluate insights like your comparative social media frequency to other companies in the same niche, your total followers & engagement vs. theirs, etc. This is in the “Business comparison” header.

Or, you can also add specific competitors and their Facebook Page(s) to compare your Facebook analytics to theirs. This is in the “Businesses to watch” header.

7. Overview (under “Content”): In this section, you can draw minute insights into every single Facebook post — from Facebook Reels to Facebook Stories. You can see your top content formats, audience retention, and also breakdown this data to compare organic vs. paid or followers vs. non-followers.

8. Content: Here, you can build customized performance charts by filtering for posts or Stories or both, media types, and marketing channels (organic or paid) on one side. 

(If you’re also running an Instagram marketing strategy, you can add that to the graph to get a cumulative performance chart.)

For the other side, you can choose from a plethora of Facebook analytics like impressions, reach, replies, sticker taps, etc.

Meta business suite is an excellent place for Facebook analytics, but it can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning. Converting these analytics to actionable Facebook insights also requires some work and practice.

3: Meta ads manager

If you’ve created ads on Facebook, you need insight into how they’re performing to calculate and improve your return on investment (ROI). The Meta ads manager helps you do just that.

Note: Facebook ads manager and Meta ads manager are the same thing.

After you’ve run your ad campaigns on Facebook, the Meta ads manager can give you extensive statistics into how they’re received in the wild. There are two tabs in the Facebook ad manager:

1. The overview tab gives you basic metrics of reach, impressions, link clicks, cost per thousand impressions (CPM), click through rates, etc., for all your ad campaigns in a table format right next to your campaign name. You can add filters using the drop-down menu to customize this data and find exactly what you’re looking for.

2. The ad reporting dashboard enables you to do the exact same thing. You can apply various filters to customize rows and columns — except here, you can also export them as a CSV file or a shareable link. You can also make this a recurring report by duplicating the analytics and switching the timeline.

4: Facebook groups

If building a community is a part of your social media strategy, Facebook groups are an excellent place to start.

Once you’ve been at it for a while, Facebook gives you valuable group insights. You can learn:

1. Individual post insights

2. Top contributors to explore partnership opportunities or a reward system 

3. Engagement trends — at what time and day do your posts get maximum engagement

Where are these insights? Enter your Facebook group and click on “Insights” in the menu on the left menu.

⚠️ Note: Facebook group insights are only relevant for your Facebook community. What hits on the group might not necessarily perform well on your Facebook page. Use group insights to dictate what you post on your Facebook group, how you interact with members, and gather feedback.

How to acquire Facebook analytics using Buffer (and why you should)

Third-party tools — like Buffer — also offer Facebook analytics. But why should you use them if you know the ins and outs of the Meta world?

1. Buffer is a social media marketing tool — so, it also helps you do related social media management activities like schedule content, cross-post it across social media sites in a few clicks, and use AI to assist caption-writing (among a host of other things). All this and more in just one tab.

2. You can gather cumulative insights data across social media platforms in one place and filter them however you like. That’s a lot of flexibility!

3. Buffer is way easier to use than any of the Meta tools. You can convert analytics to insights, fast (without scratching your head to find what you need). There’s minimal to no learning to curve to Buffer. Meta tools take a while to master.

4. You can build campaigns in Buffer and analyze their performance separately from your out-of-campaign posts.

In Buffer, you get all the basics like impressions, follower growth, reach, link clicks, yada yada. But you can also directly find the answers to questions like:

• Which type of posts get me the highest engagement on Facebook?
• How are my organic posts faring compared to my paid ads?
• What is the best time to post on Facebook for my Page?
• What is the best frequency for me on Facebook?
• What are my audience demographics?

The cherry on top? You can use Buffer to get insights into your Facebook Page and your Facebook Group.

Try it for $0 today.

Which are the Facebook analytics that truly matter?

Once you dip your toe into Facebook analytics, you realize the numbers in this universe are endless. You can examine every single post, run campaigns and measure how they did, create ads & groups, and see their performance…it’s a lot of data.

How do you make sense of the noise?

1. Start simple. First, focus on finding your ideal posting frequency, the best time to post, and the best days to post. Make these your key metrics. This will take a while because you’ll need consistency to get accurate data.

2. Then, go deeper and find which types of posts perform the best for you. Spot a pattern. Are all the posts that get the most engagement videos? Or are they text-based posts? Do customer reviews get more link clicks than product tutorials? All these insights data will help you learn where to double down your efforts.

Keep going by reviewing your analytics every so often. Create reports to see the insight in the analytics. If you keep showing up, you’ll see patterns emerge and understand the numbers that truly make a difference.