5 simple steps to start a Community Newsletter

Do you enjoy your community but wish you knew your community members better? Building ties with the users in the community has long been a vital way to improve community engagement and form a network that looks after everything from hosting events to helping out other members. Whether you're just starting a new community or have been an admin for a decade.

Writing and publishing a community newsletter is a terrific way to bring your community together and keep everyone engaged.

Every day, you most likely receive hundreds of newsletters in your mailbox. Competition is fierce, but that simply means you have to get inventive to make yours stand out from the crowd. Here is how you can make your newsletter unique & can ensure that you're providing the correct information.

1. Determine Frequency

It is critical to initially establish the practicalities of a community online newsletter. Determine how frequently you will send it. According to reports, 69% of consumers unsubscribe from email lists because they already receive "too many emails." While this is unavoidable, it is important to avoid becoming a statistic. An excellent routine to follow is once a week or once every other week. Once you've decided on a frequency, you should also pick on a day of the week to send it.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the ideal days to send email newsletters. However, based on metrics from your prior email campaigns or your general community or site traffic might help you decide on a day. You may also invite members of the community to vote on when they want to receive a newsletter.

2. Select a Tool

After you've sorted out the frequency, it's time to choose a tool. You want to use one that can hold a list of users and is simple to use. People often use MailChimp, which is excellent, but it is not the only option available and it is among the most expensive solution. Pensil provides an inbuilt tool and also gives the option to add members.

It important to create a layout for your newsletter so you don't have to figure it out for every newsletter. You should be simply putting all your curated content into a specific layout every time you wish to send a newsletter.

You can service like Unlayer to design the layout and export HTML to Pensil.  Here is a tutorial

3. Choose what content to share

What is the subject of your newsletter? What kind of material will you share on a regular basis? This is the most important step to take when creating a newsletter. A newsletter is an excellent way to market your community and grow engagement.

It's a good idea to start with broad categories like news, top posts of the week,  members spotlights, upcoming events, advice columns of your community domain, and so on. If you have particular articles or stories, jot them down as well – you can easily put them in the proper category afterward. The first rule of getting started is to make sure that all ideas are noted, so bring plenty of markers and a large easel pad to write everything.

Create a funnel to process these ideas to the final piece of writing. So you can copy & paste the content into the layout as we mentioned in the point earlier.

4. Create Interesting Subject Lines

The subject line, eh? Many marketers will tell you that this is the factor that will make or break your mailing. Of course, the material within is crucial and must be helpful to your audience, but persuading people to read your newsletter is the difficult part.

This post suggests:

  1. Say your subject line aloud
  2. Write it as if you were tweeting about it &
  3. Consider your target and talk like them

5. Set Objectives

When designing a newsletter, it is critical to define your objectives. "What is the objective of this newsletter?" you might ask. Are you attempting to interact more readily with communities, or are you attempting to attract more community members? Set KPIs to track your progress toward your goals. Read this klipflio article to read more about KPI.

6. Measure, Revise, and Repetition

Finally, once all of the above-mentioned specifics have been worked out, it's time to dispatch, measure, edit, and repeat. Your newsletter is a dynamic communication approach. Don't be scared to mix it up and tailor it to your community's needs.

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