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Write an E-mail E-newsletter with a Small Staff

Write an Email Newsletter with a Small Team

Email newsletters are in the spotlight right now … and for good reason.

They are the protagonists in the world of marketing and that's why everyone looks. Small teams to large teams think about how they can create a newsletter that is important to their customers and how they can put it together every day, every week or every month.

Larger teams have the resources to pass this task on to a dedicated team member, but what about the smaller ones?

Add a newsletter to your blog post schedule, social media calendar, and any other content your company needs to create, and you are probably thinking, "Howwww …?"

At DigitalMarketer we know this feeling firsthand. We have two weekly newsletters called DM Insider and This Week in Lab (TWIL) and pretty soon we realized that this is a lot of work. Developing topics to talk about, creating content, and sourcing the blog articles we wanted to promote in this week's newsletter became a huge black hole in time and energy.

To make sure we are efficient and don't overwhelm our team, we have figured out what we can do to publish this newsletter every week and we will now share these lessons with you …

Here are 3 tips for writing a newsletter with a small team.

# 1: Choose the template and content

The first step in your newsletter is to find out what your newsletter looks like and what it contains. This applies to your subscribers as well as to you and your team. Think of your favorite newsletters – they won't be delivered as a text-only email for a week, and the next week will be divided into sections with a variety of images and outgoing links. You want your subscribers to know what to expect from your newsletter.

And that works very well to make the newsletter process easier for you and your team.

When you have a set template, you know exactly what content you need to create, organize, and prepare for each newsletter. For example, in our newsletter we have a section called Inside Five, in which we highlight recently published marketing articles that we really liked. This is a mix of your own articles and articles published on reputable websites.

An example of digital marketer

When we post an article live on DigitalMarketer.com, we can highlight that content in our editorial table so that anyone who writes the newsletter knows that we will link to this new article in the "Inside Five" section of our next newsletter.

Publishing a newsletter is much easier with a template. Every week you put the relevant content in every block of your newsletter, so that this is faster than from zero.

# 2: automate everything

You probably expected us to say something like that. Marketers love automation – for good reason. This allows a small team to create a newsletter that is better than a company with a larger team. Your subscribers will be blinded by your great content and feel like they are reading a newsletter that took a few hours to put together.

In some cases, automation may even be better than if your team curated it. With a tool like rasa.io, you can automate the content curation of your newsletter by linking your website and RSS feeds so that your newsletter automatically populates your latest content.

Use the rasa.io tool to link a website and RSS feeds so that your newsletter automatically populates your latest content

You pull in the images, the meta description and the link so that you do not have to do anything to curate your newsletter.

Rasa.io's article retrieval tool so you can curate your email newsletter

To take your newsletter to the next level, you can offer content personalization based on a subscriber's interaction with your first multiple newsletters. For example, if you have a weekly newsletter with new recipes, based on the recipes that a subscriber clicks to learn more about, you can still view more of this article with automation.

Suppose a subscriber continues to click on your vegan recipes and never click on meat-related recipes. The rasa.io platform only shows them the vegan recipes and thus creates a personalized experience for the subscriber that gives them the feeling that your newsletter only * gets them *.

The more you can automate with your newsletter (while still maintaining high quality content), the easier it will be to send an email with a small team.

# 3: Set up your curation, editing, and sending process

A schedule is required to ensure that the newsletter gets out of the virtual door and into your subscriber's mailboxes. You want to know who will create it, who will edit it, who will have the final say on the content and copy, and who will click the Submit button.

To ensure that your newsletter is actually published, it is important to end this process. Your subscribers need consistency from you to get over the know-how, like and trust factor when you choose to buy from you and maintain their relationship with you after the purchase.

For example, the process for sending one of our weekly email newsletters looks like this:

The written process for sending one of DigitalMarketer's weekly email newsletters

Since this email cannot be automated, we have to be very specific about who does what in each step of the process and on which day everything has to be done. This ensures that we are on schedule so that this newsletter goes online on Tuesdays.

If you want to avoid a complicated planning process like this, you can again use a newsletter tool like rasa.io to automate a large part of the process shown above.

Use the rasa.io tool to plan your email newsletter.

Just because you have a small team doesn't mean you can't write a next-level email newsletter that excites your subscribers to get this * thing * out of their inbox. It just means sticking to a template, automating everything, and setting up your planning process so your subscribers know you are delivering on their promises.

So put your team together and find out how to create your own newsletter. Using a newsletter tool can make it so much better for your subscribers and easier for your team.