How to create a newsletter: 3 keys to success

A newsletter that people read rests on three things: you send it to the right people, it brings them something useful and it arrives regularly according to a plan. In this article you will find a step-by-step process for creating a newsletter, how to divide contacts into groups, what to write when you have no news, how often to send and how to put together a plan for twelve weeks ahead.

In a nutshell

1. The recipient decides within a few seconds whether to open an email or delete it. The question they ask is: "What's in it for me?"
2. The first key: send the right people the right information at the right moment. That means dividing your contacts into groups.
3. The second key: keep their attention. An email the recipient benefits from ensures they will open the next one too.
4. The third key: regular, long-term communication that combines useful content with sales emails.
5. A twelve-week plan is an ordinary table: contact groups in rows, weeks in columns, topics in the cells.
6. For most companies, one to two emails per fortnight is enough. More emails do not mean more clicks.

In short: what a newsletter is, who to send it to, how often and what is at stake

• What it is: a regular email for people who want to receive it. It builds a relationship and combines useful content with an offer.
• Who to send it to: not the same thing to everyone. Each group of contacts gets what interests it.
• How often: usually once or twice a fortnight, always according to a plan for three months ahead.
• What is at stake: people stop opening a newsletter made up of nothing but special offers and discounts, unsubscribe from it or mark it as spam.

What has changed since the article was published: The article first came out in 2019 and its three keys still hold without change. In September 2026 we added a seven-step process, a sample twelve-week plan, content ideas by industry and data from 2022 to 2024: how long people spend reading an email, why they unsubscribe and how sending frequency affects clicks.

What a newsletter is and why people open it or delete it

A newsletter is an email that a company regularly sends to people in its database in order to maintain a relationship with them, and which combines useful content with a commercial offer. It is not a one-off advertisement. A good newsletter is the reason a customer thinks of you at the moment they need something.

"What's in it for me?" "Why should I care about this?"

These and similar questions sit somewhere in the back of the mind of everyone who has just opened their inbox and is looking at all the emails that have arrived. As they look at the list of new emails, they are working out which ones they will deal with and which ones they will not. If they can see that an email brings them something they are interested in at that moment, they will open it and read it. They may then click through to your website and perhaps buy straight away, register or take whatever other action the newsletter encouraged them to take. This whole decision process takes only a few seconds, which is why it is so important to know how to make sure your emails do not end up in the bin.

Measurements confirm that it really is a matter of seconds. Litmus has long been tracking how much time people spend with an open email. That time gets shorter year after year.

In four years, the attention given to a single email has shrunk by roughly a third. A newsletter therefore has to show within a few seconds who it is meant for and what it brings the recipient.

That is, of course, easier said than done. Let's look at how to get to this state, or at least as close to it as possible.

How to create a newsletter in 7 steps

The whole process fits into seven steps. The following parts of the article cover each of them in detail.

1. Divide your contacts into groups. Start with potential and existing customers, and divide existing customers further by what they have bought from you.
2. For each group, write down what interests it and what questions it is dealing with. Base this on what your customers ask you.
3. Make a table with the groups in rows and twelve weeks in columns, and write the email topics into the cells.
4. Include both useful and sales emails in the plan, so that a sales offer is always preceded by an email the recipient benefits from.
5. Write an email with one topic, a clear subject line and one call to action.
6. Send the email only to the group it is intended for.
7. After sending, check the click-through rate and the unsubscribe rate, and adjust the topics and the frequency in the plan according to the results.

Try writing a newsletter in Quanda

Who to send a newsletter to: the first key

"Who are the right people for my newsletter?"

The days when everything was sent to everyone are long gone. Why? The answer is very simple. Take a look at your own inbox. The number of emails each of us receives every day is now so large that we simply do not have time to deal with all of them. That is why, whenever you open your inbox, you quickly run through what has arrived, delete all the unimportant emails and then open the ones that "survived" this purge to see what is inside.

If you send people messages they are not interested in, there is only a very small chance they will open and read your newsletter. That is why you need to divide all your contacts into different groups according to what you are going to send them.

Segmentation is the division of the contacts in a database into groups according to what they have in common, so that each group receives content that is relevant to it.

Your potential customers will probably be interested in something different from the customers who have been working with you for many years. So make a table and, in the first column, write the names of the groups you will divide your contacts into. The basic division will be into potential customers and existing customers. Existing customers can then be divided further by which products or services they have bought from you. You can also group them by their business potential, meaning by which other products or services are suitable for them.

You can create as many groups as you like. From experience, however, I know that dividing contacts too finely into groups that are too small is of little practical use, because you probably will not be able to produce that many different newsletters yourself.

What segmentation does to results

Mailchimp has shown on its users' campaigns that dividing contacts pays off. It compared around 11,000 segmented campaigns from 2,000 senders with the campaigns the same senders sent to their whole database.

Source: Mailchimp, Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing Stats, around 9 million recipients, as of February 2017. Mailchimp has not published a more recent comparison on the same scale.

Twice as many clicks are not the work of better graphics. People simply received an email that was relevant to them.

Tip: In Quanda, groups are created using tags. You assign a tag during import, manually in the contact list or through an automation, for example after a click on a link in an email. When you select the recipients of a campaign, you then just choose the tag. The process is described in the guides Tags and Filtering of contacts and selection of recipients in a simple campaign.

Once you have your contacts divided into the right groups, it is time to look at what will interest them, and therefore what you are going to send them.

Why a newsletter full of special offers and discounts does not work

"Sale! Discount! Sale! Discount! Why doesn't it work?"

Part of the answer lies in the previous section. Quite simply, not everything is interesting to everyone. The second part of the answer lies in the content. In what we send to people. Not even the best special offer or discount on a product I do not need or, worse still, on a product I have already bought will persuade me to buy. Have you ever bought something from an online shop, say for your workshop or garden, and then received one email after another about kitchen knives, stainless steel cookware or cleaning products, because the shop you bought from happens to stock those as well? Or have you bought a plane ticket and keep getting the same emails over and over, each time with slightly different graphics, offering flights to European capitals at a reduced price? Regardless of how often and where you fly, every week you get one email advertising a discounted ticket.

If newsletters turn into nothing but product advertising that keeps offering more and more products, special offers and discounts, you will soon lose interest in these emails and unsubscribe.

Recipients see it the same way. In 2024, Sinch Mailgun asked more than 2,000 consumers in the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain why they unsubscribe from emails.

The three most common reasons have a common denominator. Too many emails, lost interest and content that is not relevant to the recipient were given by 55 % of people in total. Mistakes in graphics and technology play a much smaller role. People do not leave because of how a newsletter looks, but because of what is in it and how often it arrives.

What to write in a newsletter: the second key

So what then? To sell or not to sell?

Try going through the emails you receive and think about which ones you deleted and which ones you read. Emails that are "just advertising" are usually the first to go in the bin. But not all of them, right? Emails that bring something interesting for you, right at this moment, have a better chance of staying. So what is the key to success?

Let's go back to the example with the plane tickets. I have two small children, and the first time my wife and I flew with them, it was quite a scramble at the airport. Where to put the pushchair, what to do with the baby milk, what I can and cannot take on board with me and so on. I could certainly have found all of this out beforehand, but you know how it goes. Some people look into it and study everything in advance, others, like us, deal with it on the spot. In the end, everything turned out to be simpler than it seemed and it all went smoothly and comfortably.

Why am I writing about this? The airline that sold us the tickets knows that we are all going to fly many weeks in advance. Instead of emailing me an offer of more discounted tickets every week, it could have sent me information on how to check in comfortably with children, and where, when and to whom to hand over the pushchair that is flying with us. Since they know that in London we will be transferring from one airport to another, we would have really appreciated a map of the airport showing where to find the stop for the bus that carries passengers between the airports.

If I had received emails like these, do you think I would have deleted them straight away, just like the advertising ones? No. I would have kept them, and perhaps even forwarded them to the friends who were flying with us. And if the next email I received was an offer of more flights, would I look at it after this earlier experience with a useful email? Yes. I probably would not take up the offer, but I would read it, because this company sends me interesting and useful information.

Ideas for useful content by industry

The same principle works in every industry. Just ask what the customer is dealing with before a purchase, after it and between purchases.

When nothing comes to mind, go through the questions your customers ask you. Each of them is a ready-made topic, because more people have it on their minds than the one person who asked out loud. For examples from one particular industry, see the article Email marketing for real estate agents.

How to create a newsletter plan for 12 weeks: the third key

The more you know about the contacts in your email database, the more precise your communication can be. The more you know, the more easily you will find content that appeals to your contacts. My example with the plane tickets showed that from a single purchase alone, an airline can find out how old I am, whether I have children, how many of us are travelling and where to. Thanks to this information, it can prepare content about travelling with children, information on international flights and transfers, information on checking in with children and so on. We could certainly come up with plenty of options.

Will this information be of interest only to me? I do not think so. On the contrary, I think it interests, and will go on interesting, everyone who travels with children. So once they have prepared it, they can use it for a long time to come and for many other customers, whom it will serve just as well as it would have served me. And if it needs updating, that can be done very quickly. Will these emails help build a better relationship between me as a customer and the airline? Definitely. Will my trust grow in an airline that is not only interested in selling me another ticket? Definitely, yes. And where there is trust, there is business.

A communication plan is a table that says, for each group of contacts, which email it will receive in which week.

Now let's go back to the table you started creating. In the first column you have your contact groups. In the following columns, write the numbers of the weeks. Step by step, a simple communication plan will start to emerge that helps you keep everything under better control. I recommend making this plan for at least three months, that is, twelve weeks ahead. Then write into the individual cells what content you are going to send.

This is what the first six weeks of a plan might look like for a company that sells and services heat pumps. Sales emails are in bold.

The sample shows three things. No group receives more than one email a week. Each group reads about what it is dealing with right now. And the sales email only comes after emails that gave the recipient something.

In most cases, one to two emails per fortnight will do. Do not forget the sales emails, which have to appear in this plan as well. Sending emails too often is just as much of a mistake as sending them very rarely. You have to experiment a little and discover the right frequency for yourself. There is no exact rule for how many emails to send. And that brings us to the third key to successful newsletters.

Looking at this plan, you will see that you are holding a tool for steering your email communication towards the different groups of your contacts. And it is the "non-sales", useful content that ensures people do not lose attention. You will need that attention precisely so that they open and read the sales emails you send them.

This plan will also show you in good time what content you are missing, so that you can prepare it in time. I recommend involving more people in creating content, if you have them available, so that it does not all rest on you. If you are on your own, set aside time when you will write regularly. You may even start to enjoy it and end up writing for more than just your newsletters.

Tip: Emails that every new contact should receive in the same order do not have to be sent manually. In Quanda you prepare them once as an email series and every contact receives them from the first part onwards. The process is in the guide How to create and set up an e-mail series.

How often to send a newsletter

The fear that few emails mean little business leads companies to send more and more. The data show the opposite. GetResponse evaluated more than 4.4 billion emails that its customers sent in 2023 and compared the results by the number of newsletters per week.

Senders with one newsletter a week have a click-through rate of 5.71 %, senders with four have 2.99 %. So every additional email in the week takes attention away from the others. Treat the numbers as a comparison between groups of senders, not as a target. The open rate is also inflated by automatic opens in Apple Mail, as explained in the article Email open rate: is 20 % a lot or a little?

The same Sinch Mailgun survey that looked into the reasons for unsubscribing also asked how often people want to receive offers from brands. The largest share, 25.7 %, chose once a week.

Warning: The opposite mistake is just as costly. If you get in touch once every six months, the recipient does not remember you, does not recognise the email and easily marks it as spam. People mostly do not unsubscribe en masse, they simply forget about you.

You will recognise the right frequency from your own numbers. If the unsubscribe rate rises and the click-through rate falls after you start sending more often, you are sending too often. If both numbers hold, your frequency is set well.

How to tell that a newsletter is working

Track three numbers for every campaign and compare them mainly with your own previous campaigns.

To give you a sense of scale: newsletters in the GetResponse data for 2023 had an average open rate of 40.08 % and a click-through rate of 3.84 %, while in Europe the average for all emails came to 43.25 % and 3.58 %. More important than someone else's average, though, is your own development over time. The meaning of the individual values in Quanda is described in the guide What the terms in statistics mean.

Checklist before sending a newsletter

• I know which group of contacts I am sending the email to and why to that group in particular.
• The email has one main topic and one call to action.
• The subject line says what the recipient will get out of the email.
• The main message is visible without scrolling.
• The recipient benefits from the email even if they buy nothing today.
• The email is in the plan and I know what I will send this group next.
• After sending, I will note down the click-through rate and the unsubscribe rate.

Final word

The three keys can be summed up in one sentence: send useful things to the right people and do it regularly. Start with a table of groups and twelve weeks. The rest will follow from it.

How to extend the plan to a whole year, how to find your own frequency and how to evaluate the ratio of useful to sales content is covered step by step in the free online course Email strategy: a communication plan that delivers results. If you would like to go through your plan with us, arrange a free consultation or write to us at support@onquanda.com.

Fingers crossed!