Email newsletters are a great way to keep your customers engaged with your brand. The average open rate of email newsletters across industries is 26.77%. And the trend is for email engagement to increase.
As a coworking business, you can also use email to your advantage. With regular engagement, your members can develop an affinity with your coworking space and stick with it.
Don’t know how to create a newsletter for coworking members and when to send them? Follow our expert guide!
1. Determine the Goals of Your Newsletter
Want to know how to create a newsletter that works? Set a goal (or goals) for your email campaign first. This will help ensure your overarching content strategy aligns. Your newsletter goal can be anything from driving traffic to your coworking website to boosting renewals of memberships or the number of new coworking members.
You can have multiple newsletter goals, too. These would depend on your overall business goals. If your priority business goal at the moment is increasing sales, for instance, your newsletter goals could be to increase the number of new coworking members and boost renewals.
Don’t forget to also set the key performance indicators that will help you determine whether your newsletter is effective. These should depend on your newsletter goals, of course.
So, if your newsletter goal is to boost renewals, don’t use as a metric the number of people who visited your website. A more appropriate KPI would be the number of membership renewals that were completed through your emails.
2. Choose a Newsletter Platform
You need a newsletter platform for your email campaigns. Why newsletter software and not just email service providers like Gmail or Outlook? Well, because with email newsletter software, you can do much more than just send emails. You can create forms and pop-ups to build your email list. You can also create different types of email campaigns. As you shall see later on, some email software solutions also allow you to test your emails before you send them so you can achieve the best campaign results.
That said, here are a few other tips on how to choose an effective email marketing platform:
- It should ensure you’re GDPR-compliant.
- It should provide email analytics data such as click-through rates, open rates, and more.
- It should help you create highly visual newsletter campaigns.
- It should be easy to use.
Many email marketing platforms offer free trials of their products for at least 14 days. You might want to take advantage of this free trial to determine whether the tool is a good fit for your coworking business before you invest.
3. Design Visually Appealing Templates
An email template can help you save time when creating a newsletter. Sure, good email newsletter platforms already come with beautiful email templates you can use. But wouldn’t it be better if the template you used was also tailored to your brand’s specifications? Consistency is key to brand recall. And by this, I don’t just mean consistency in brand name. A staggering 81% of people are more likely to remember a brand’s color than its name. Plus, 75% of consumers remember brands by their logo.
So, focus on the colors and the logo when designing your own email newsletter templates. Remember to choose a color palette that reflects your brand personality. Just to give you an idea, here’s an infographic that shows the values associated with each color:
So, if you’re more of a fun coworking space brand, your chosen colors could be red, orange, or yellow, or a combination of them.
Add other relevant branding elements like logos to make your newsletter template recognizable at first glance. You don’t have to incorporate your logos in all your email templates, by the way. For as long as your color scheme is consistent throughout, you shouldn’t have any problem with brand recognition.
When designing your email newsletter templates, you’d need to choose your preferred layout for each template as well. Do you want a single-column, double-column, or a hybrid layout?
A single-column layout streamlines the information in your newsletter from top to bottom. This makes it easier for the reader to consume your information. A single-column layout, after all, mimics the natural reading pattern. It also leaves room for white space, which is necessary to ensure your newsletter is scannable.
A double-column newsletter template design, meanwhile, helps you arrange your information in two columns on the same page. It’s ideal if you want to send more information to readers in a single newsletter or if you have multiple images to share.
A hybrid or multi-column newsletter design has more than two columns. Be wary of using this layout, though. It’s considered an information-heavy format.
Whatever layout you choose, keep in mind that 55% of people read their emails on mobile devices. So, make your choice of templates mobile-friendly.
Make sure your templates are responsive. This way, no matter what device they’re viewed on, they’ll look good. Make your CTA buttons big and bold, so people can click them with their thumbs while using a phone. And don’t forget to keep your fonts bigger, at least 14 pixels for paragraph text.
Pro tip: Most great newsletter platforms let you check what your email will look like on various devices before you hit send.
As a final tip, create a business card using one of the best digital business card solutions and incorporate it into your standard email signature at the bottom of each template. This can help you expand on the basic information that figures in each email you send. So, apart from your name and contact number that typically appear in an email signature, you can include other important information like your coworking website and social media URLs.
Besides, this way, you give your email subscribers the option to instantly save all these relevant details on their mobile devices. As a result, they can easily check out your website or contact you using their preferred platforms.
4. Craft Compelling Content
Once you’ve created your template with the right design elements, it’s time to craft and incorporate your actual newsletter content.
Your email newsletter body should depend on your email newsletter goals. For instance, if your goal is to boost renewals of memberships or increase the number of new coworking members, then you could highlight the benefits of coworking spaces in your newsletter, like this:
Another option is to promote special offers to get them to book with you. Make sure you incorporate high-quality images of your coworking space for the best results:
On the other hand, if your goal is to drive traffic to your website, your newsletter body could promote your newest blog posts.
The truth is, the sky’s the limit when it comes to the types of content you can create for your email newsletter body. Whatever you choose to do, just make sure it’s compelling. In other words, it should be something your newsletter subscribers will be interested in.
That’s why it helps to understand your email recipients’ preferences and segment your mailing list from the get-go. You can have something like this pop up as soon as your website visitors subscribe to your email list. It can help facilitate your contact list segmentation.
Don’t just focus on the email newsletter body, though. Your email newsletter content includes your subject lines as well. So, you need to craft catchy and compelling subject lines. The email subject line should be powerful enough to get your subscribers to open your coworking space newsletter in the first place.
Keep it short and concise. You can make the reader an offer or reveal some exciting news about your coworking space to prompt them to click. The goal is to spark their curiosity.
Make sure you also incorporate a good call-to-action. This should tell your target audience what they should do after reading your email. Use a strong verb like “Sign Up” or “Learn More,” for example. The CTA should also stand out in the email.
For the best results, perform A/B testing on potential subject lines and CTAs. This will help you determine which ones elicit a response from your audience and, therefore, which ones you should use. We’ll talk about testing in the next section.
5. Test and Send
Testing is crucial to ensuring the success of your coworking space newsletter campaigns. You’ll need to test different versions of the same email newsletter with a sample of your audience to see which one is more likely to work.
If you’re using email marketing software, this shouldn’t be hard to do. Good email platforms allow you to test both the subject line and your email body. For instance, GetResponse allows you to test up to five different subject lines for one email message:
You can also create email body variants and test one variable, for instance, your call-to-action, at a time. Then, just send your email body and subject line variations to up to 50% of your subscribers. The platform will tell you the winning email and subject line based on engagement after the testing period.
It’s not enough for you to have the best email body and subject line, though. You’ll still need to send your coworking space newsletter at the right time to ensure it receives optimal engagement.
In general, marketing professionals receive the highest engagement for emails between 4 AM and 6 AM and between 5 PM and 7 PM. Additionally, they found that the best day to send emails is Tuesday while the worst is Saturday.
You might want to follow those guidelines based on research if you’re sending your first coworking space newsletter. Then just adjust your sending times based on your own business experience.
In Closing
Coworking newsletters can help you grow your coworking business. But you have to follow a process when creating and sending them to ensure your campaigns are effective.
Don’t know how to create a newsletter for your coworking space? Don’t worry. It’s not that hard. Just set goals for your newsletter. Choose the right newsletter platform to create your emails. Then design visually appealing email newsletter templates to help you save time. Customize your templates with compelling and valuable content.
Before you hit send, don’t forget to conduct A/B tests to determine the best variation. Once you know that, send out your winning coworking newsletter at the appropriate time to boost your chances of good engagement.
Now that you know how to create a newsletter, go ahead and do just that. Send it at the best time, and you’ll soon reap the vast benefits it brings to your coworking business.
