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| Newsletter: Guide, definition, examples and template |
What is a newsletter? Definition
The term newsletter (or newsletter) refers to a communication tool that consists of sending information to a list of recipients by e-mail. The content of the newsletter is mainly intended to inform and inform on topics of interest to the contact, the news of the sender, or to highlight commercial offers, promotional offers, to promote e-commerce.
Businesses often use newsletters to communicate with prospects and customers, making them a widely used marketing and sales tool. This type of communication has the advantage of being sent in bulk to a large number of recipients and sent instantly.
A professional newsletter must be sent regularly: quarterly, monthly, weekly or even daily. The frequency of sending (periodicity) is essentially based on what is highlighted in the newsletter.
Technically, newsletters are written in HTML/CSS format, read by webmail or messaging software, and displayed to recipients. However, the newsletter can also be displayed in plain text format in your mailbox.
How much does a newsletter cost?
One of the main advantages of sending newsletters is the cost. In other words, it is extremely profitable. Done with care, the return on investment far exceeds all other traditional marketing channels. At least, a Litmus study of 372 marketers announced an ROI of 38:1, with an average return of $38 for every $1 invested.
So how much does a newsletter really cost a business? This is clearly an almost impossible calculation. The unit price of the newsletter depends on many factors, including the service provider used to send it. But in general, sending newsletters is a very affordable marketing activity, costing thousands of dollars, a ridiculous amount compared to other more traditional means.
The advantages of the newsletter
For businesses and organizations, using newsletters as a means of communication offers many benefits, including:
Easy set-up solution: Setting up a newsletter is usually very simple and requires little technical knowledge.
Excellent ROI: As mentioned earlier in this article, the profitability of email marketing, or newsletters, is unmatched.
Powerful information and loyalty tools: Thanks to newsletters, you can stay in touch with your subscribers, users and customers by highlighting new products and know-how to build loyalty.
A real vehicle for sales: Email marketing in the broadest sense is one of the most important marketing tools for sales for many companies.
The different types of newsletters and email marketing
There are different types of marketing messages used by businesses to meet different needs. Below is a comprehensive list to help you find your way around:
Newsletter
This is the subject of our article, and as you can see, the newsletter is intended to disseminate information, advice, and company news to a list of subscribers. Ideal frequency: Regular newsletter (every Monday, monthly, quarterly, it's yours).
Lead/Win Email
This type of message is sent to a base of qualified opt-in contacts and allows the sender to offer a solution or product to potentially interested prospects. Sent according to the possibilities and the strategic needs of the company.
email advertising
Typically, in the customer retention process, companies send so-called "marketing" emails to their own databases with the ultimate goal of upselling or cross-selling. These e-mails can be automated or sent all at once to very precise segments of your customers during the year or at the best moment of your activity.
service or transactional emails
These are email messages sent automatically after an action by a user or customer. For example, order confirmation emails, password reset emails. These messages are what users expect.
reminder email
It is often recommended for communication services to relaunch prospects and former customers. Here you will receive a follow-up email. These can be fully automated to ensure a continuous flow of marketing follow-ups and the ability to reuse leads that have been inactive for a long time.
What is an email campaign?
Email campaign is the term used to prepare, create and send marketing emails or newsletters. An email campaign includes all actions that lead to sending, etc. A statistical analysis and monitoring phase can also be considered an integral part of your emailing campaign.
Within professional software or SaaS solutions, the term email campaign is often used to describe outgoing files. This folder usually has access to return a list of contacts, message content, its parameters (subject, sender, reply-to email address, etc.) and statistics such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe/etc. Exit rate, bounces, crawl traffic.
Preparing for an email marketing campaign is both a business and a marketing process. It starts with the selection of the target, the definition of the content and the treatment of the comments, and continues with the graphic and editorial creation. Establishing a clear methodology is key to optimizing email campaign setup times, maximizing conversion rates, and achieving high profitability.
Why set up a newsletter?
Because newsletters are the most effective and fastest means of communication. The American research institute McKinsey estimates that emailing is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in terms of customer acquisition.
Given this number still used from today's perspective, sending marketing emails can be very effective. The technological evolutions offered by solution providers allow email to maintain its brilliance in terms of relevance and accuracy.
For example, predictive sending, a technology that allows you to predict in advance the best time to send marketing messages to specific recipients. Leveraging intelligent analytics and machine learning techniques, these tools automatically trigger emails to be sent at the optimal time for each contact in your email list.
Among these intelligent technologies, we can also mention predictive eye tracking, anti-spam predictions, or even automatic courtesy detection that makes email marketing an ever-modern tool.
On the other hand, the ease of setting up your newsletter is one of the criteria that ranks your newsletter among the best marketing solutions. In a few minutes, you can now very easily create a newsletter from A to Z without any prior technical knowledge. In addition, the web is full of tutorials and advice articles for a successful newsletter.
Which tool to create a newsletter?
To create your newsletter, you need to decide on a tool. If you decide to primarily use Photoshop and Outlook together, you're on the wrong track. Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. are completely unsuitable for creating and sending professional newsletters for various reasons.
Therefore, we recommend that you switch to a professional email solution or software for marketing purposes. There are many solutions on the market. If you are a beginner, we recommend that you choose an all-in-one French solution that offers accessible customer service that can guide and help you with your marketing strategy.
To help you choose the tool that suits you best, we have prepared a summary article comparing the four most popular newsletter software in France: Sarbacane, Sendinblue, Mailjet and American Mailchimp.
This article will help you make a decision by detailing the different solutions. Nevertheless, we summarize our opinion on these four actors here so as not to interrupt your reading. I recommend coming back to the comparison later for more details.
Our opinion on Mailchimp: the American newsletter tool
Mailchimp's initially attractive pricing made it the biggest player in international email. Indeed, Mailchimp offers a free version of its software to appease the public.
If the tool itself is very effective and complete, it appears to be a particularly difficult marketing solution to master and monetize due to its many flaws.
Indeed, despite its attractive packages, Mailchimp's billing system is based both on the number of contacts imported into the software and on the number of emails sent. This method is associated with the price of the newsletter which increases significantly as soon as the number of recipients increases or you send more messages than expected.
On the other hand, as an 100% American player, I face two big problems.
- Mailchimp is only available in English
- The deliverability of emails in France is very low
Chimpanzee Solution's headquarters are in the United States, as are our outgoing servers. Both of the above disadvantages are due to these properties. If you don't speak English, you might find it hard to navigate Mailchimp's rich interface.
On the other hand, emails sent to French email addresses (SFR, Orange, Bouygues) are much more likely to be classified as spam. Mailchimp is the lord of cheap free newsletters. After all, no customer service costs less than $300 per month. If you have a problem or get stuck in an app, there's no one to turn to unless you pay the price.
Our opinion on Sendinblue: the low-cost newsletter software
Sendinblue is a low-cost software initially developed in France, but which has since moved part of the team to Asia. The software offers a trial version limited to sending 300 emails per day, with great benefits like sending transactional emails and powerful integrations with many external marketing tools.
The app is not without flaws, but its range of features is acceptable. The creation of the registration form was particularly successful. There are still some pretty obvious flaws in terms of usability, especially when it comes to the email composition tools, but that's the price of a cost-effective solution. The customer service page allows you to contact Sendinblue by phone... a toll-free number. Too bad for the original French solution. Don't expect to spend more than 5 minutes on the phone with a consultant. Otherwise, you risk walking away with a higher bill than the software subscription itself.
However, you can credit Sendinblue for the fact that they provide access to online resources in French (unlike Mailchimp).
Our opinion on Mailjet: the transaction specialist
Mailjet is also a French solution. In fact, the solution is original since it was adopted by the American actor Mailgun in 2019. The operation relocated the routing infrastructure to the United States.
Little information has been released on the impact of this acquisition on deliverability, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and compliance with data protection laws, and exposure of personal data to laws Americans on the cloud. Many users would be skeptical if Mailjet downplayed these results in their press releases. Functionally, Mailjet is a relatively standard application, although ergonomic. However, the main difference between the tools is that they provide a flexible API that allows transactional SMS to be sent.
Note that on their support page, Mailjet offers customer service by email and "coaching" type deliverability training. But overall, you're dealing with minimal customer service here, and given Mailjet's "low cost" rates, you can't expect much more anyway.
Our opinion on Sarbacane: the high-end application
Unlike its main competitors, Sarbacane does not play the obvious “cheapest” card to attract its customers. The company based in France since 2001 can boast in 2020 of being the last player in 100% French email marketing. This allows Sarbacane to keep its customer service, all its teams and its entire infrastructure in the North of France, near Lille.
Sarbacane allows the design and progression of newsletters, marketing SMS, registration forms, landing pages and offers to equip its toilet campaigns to a publicist with horribly dismal automation scenarios. Smart features finish it off: predictive sending, eye-tracking, anti-spam review, civility marking...
The handling proposes by far the EmailBuilder, the most dismal e-mail publicist of the market, and practically the most struck in completion of ergonomics and speed.
On the other hand, the principles offered by Sarbacane far surpass the services of its competitors: list of non-surcharged bigophone, chat, email, webinars, on-site training, simultaneity and personalized passing... right down to presenting the principles of a dedicated coupé. At the same time, the company offers principles worthy of a marketing office, making it possible to create flattering reign for its customers as a fundamental between them professional newsletter templates or better as a director from A to Z of the design and progress from to them campaigns.