How to create a Newsletter

You asked for it – so I’m giving it to you. This is how you create a newsletter. And in my case, I’m going to show you how to create a Newsletter with Mailerlite. If you wanna know why I went with Mailerlite instead of MailChimp or any other company – Ana from The She Approach has a great blog post on it.

As it’s going to be one of my longer posts I’ll jump right into it. It will have everything from creating the actual Newsletter, sign up forms and popups to how an automated mail chain is set up.

click here to subscribe to my Newsletter

Before we can get started you need to register and set up an account. Now you don’t need to sign up with Mailerlite. There are a lot of companies offering Newsletter services. This just was the best option for me as it’s free and even after 1000 contacts (will I ever get this many?!) it’s still quite cheap compared to others.

You’ve set up your account and now you have your empty dashboard. The best way to get on from here is if you have a long and hard think about how you would like your Newsletter to look like and what you wanna include in it. Don’t forget to think about when and how many times a month it will be going out. I loved using Pinterest for inspiration and just by being subscribed to other Newsletters, I had a pretty good idea how it could look like. And I decided that mine is going out every other week. By writing everything down, it helps you to have a clear view of what you want. And you can always go back an check anything you might missed.

Forms: Get yourself those subscribers!

Before we send out our first Newsletter we need people we can send it to. So setting up some forms is essentials. With Mailerlite you have three options. Either you can set up a popup, landing page or embedded forms which can be placed anywhere on your blog pages. Once you clicked on your desired form, you’ll be guided through the whole process – easy peasy.

I started with an embedded form. Choose the title and info you wanna include. Once you have this, you can play around with colours and how big/small you want the whole form etc. to be.

Important: with whatever form you create, you can always choose to do a double opt-in process. This means your subscribers have to confirm their subscription with an email that is sent to them. But it’s up to you if you wanna do this.

Here you can see the results on how my popup turned out. Next, to it you can see the code which can be embedded where ever you like (in a post, on a page etc.).

If you choose to do the double up in – this is how your email might look. I always tried with every form and email to keep the colour scheme the same so people can identify with it and my blog.

I won’t get into much more details as a how to set up a popup or a landing page as Mailerlite will literally guide you through it from one step to another! Once you’ve done your first form everything will become quite easy.

Campaigns: Let’s create a Newsletter

Now that you have acquired some people for your newsletter, it’s time to create the actual newsletter! My very first one didn’t look as pink as my current one as I got carried away with all the options I had. Don’t make the same mistake – stick to what you know will fit with your blog. This will save you a lot of time! (Talking from experience.)

Just in the right top corner of your Dashboard, you’ll see the button “Create Campaign”. Click on it. As with your forms, insert your Titel. No worries if you wanna change it later on, it’s always possible to change it. Choose the list of peoples you wanna send the Newsletter to and then you’re set up to actually create the Newsletter and its content. You will be able to choose from pre-made templates or you can create your own. I choose to do my own.

What you can see below is your Dashboard when editing the content of your Newsletter. There are so many ways to on how to add pictures, text, links, call to action buttons and and and. Play around and see what fits best for you and your Newsletter.

When you click on Design you can change the background etc. of your Newsletter.

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Once you enter one of your content boxes, you then can customize them further with your text, links and images. By clicking on settings you can change the size of your text, change your colours or the placement of your photos etc.

Once you have entered all your content you can move on to the next page. There you have your review dashboard. You can have a preview of your Newsletter or if there need to be changes made you can do it from here. What’s left to do is set the time and date you want your Newsletter to go out and you are done!

Automation: Let’s welcome any new subscribers

For any of you who wanna go the extra mile or just are really interested in all the tools some platforms offer – this one’s for you. With Mailerlite you get the option of sending out automated emails. Now you can use this in many ways. I use it to send out an automated Welcome Newsletter. This means whenever someone subscribes to my newsletter, they get a mail with my Welcome message.

To create such an automated chain you need to click on your dashboard on Automation. Then you will be guided through the process. At first, it might seem a little confusing but just play around and get used to it. First, you select a group of people you wanna send it to. Then by clicking on the add button, you create a new Mail which can be edited right away or later. For my automated chain, this is the end.

However, if you wanna send out multiple mails you can create a chain with many more steps and rules. This means you can create a whole automated process that sends out the mail.  Then you have a rule, that when someone hasn’t opened that mail within a week or so a second mail will be sent out etc.. Or you can do two different emails for the ones that opened the first mail and for the ones that didn’t open it. You can see there are endless options on how you can create automated mail chains.

Happy creating

So this is it from me. I know it’s a lot but you’ll have this blog post to come back to whenever you need help or feel free to leave me a comment when you need some more info (happy to help).

I’d love to hear how you found this post or if you have already a Newsletter which platform do you use?

As ever thanks for stopping by and don’t forget to subscribe. You can find me on  Instagram / Twitter / FB and Bloglovin’.