Everyone has a newsletter. But not everyone gets something out of it. Some brands send emails that their subscribers eagerly await. Others see their messages land in spam or go ignored. The difference isn't luck. It's method.
Here's how to create an e-commerce newsletter that really works, from strategy to sending.
What exactly is a newsletter?
A newsletter is an email sent regularly to a list of subscribers. It can inform, build loyalty, promote, and tell a story. In e-commerce, it generally serves to maintain the connection with your customers between purchases, announce new products or promotions, and strengthen your brand identity.
What distinguishes it from social media is that you own it. No algorithm to decide who sees what. No overnight drop in reach. Your subscribers are your asset. And no platform can take that away from you.
The numbers confirm the benefit: for every euro spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is around 35 to 38 euros. It's hard to find a more profitable channel.
Before creating anything: define your objective
This is the step everyone skips. And it's often where things go wrong.
A newsletter can have several objectives: increase sales, retain existing customers, strengthen your brand image, or inform your audience. The problem is that a newsletter that tries to do everything at once ends up doing nothing well.
Ask yourself a simple question before you start: what do I want my reader to do after reading this email? Buy a product? Discover a new item? Feel closer to my brand? The answer dictates everything else: the content, the tone, the CTA, the frequency.
Choose the right tool
You don't create a newsletter from Gmail or Outlook. These tools are not made for that: sending limits are restricted, deliverability is poor, and you have no access to statistics.
For an e-commerce brand, Klaviyo stands out as the benchmark. It integrates natively with Shopify and WooCommerce, centralizes your customer data, and allows you to create highly segmented campaigns in a few clicks. But other options exist depending on your stage of development: Brevo to start with a limited budget, Omnisend for a simplified multichannel approach.
The essential thing is to choose a tool that allows you to segment your mailings, analyze your results, and automate key sequences.
Build your subscriber list
A newsletter without a list is a newspaper without readers. Even before thinking about content, you need to attract qualified subscribers.
Methods that work in e-commerce: a well-calibrated pop-up on your site (not too early, not too aggressive), a welcome offer in exchange for signing up (promo code, early access, exclusive content), a visible form in the footer and on product pages, and your social networks to link back to your list.
Caution: quality always trumps quantity. 2,000 subscribers genuinely interested in your brand are worth more than 10,000 randomly collected addresses. An artificially inflated list means reduced deliverability and mass unsubscriptions.
Create your newsletter content
Here's the core of the matter. And the question everyone asks: what do we write?
The basic rule in e-commerce is not to turn your newsletter into a catalog. Purely promotional emails eventually tire out your subscribers and drive up unsubscribes. The best newsletters mix useful content with subtle promotion.
Some ideas that work well: sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses of your brand (manufacturing, team, values), offering usage tips or tutorials related to your products, announcing new products or launches as a preview, sharing customer reviews or testimonials, or even exclusive offers reserved for subscribers.
Regarding frequency: 61% of users prefer to receive one newsletter per week. This is a good starting point, but it mainly depends on your ability to produce quality content. A well-crafted monthly newsletter is better than a rushed weekly one.
Care for the form as much as the substance
Good content in an unreadable email is lost content. A few simple rules to follow:
Respect your brand identity. Logo, colors, typography: your subscribers should recognize you at a glance, even without reading the content.
Use a real sender name. Not a noreply@ address. A first name, or at least your brand name. It makes all the difference for trust and open rates.
Craft your email subject line carefully. It's the first thing your subscriber sees. If the subject doesn't grab attention, everything else will be useless. Avoid spam words: free, urgent, 100% guaranteed. Instead, focus on curiosity or concrete utility.
Test on mobile before sending. More than 50% of opens happen on smartphones. An email that displays poorly on an iPhone will be closed before it's even read.
One CTA per email. Too many buttons kill the action. Choose a single direction and guide your reader towards it.
Segment to better engage
This is where many brands leave money on the table. Sending the same newsletter to your entire list is acceptable to start. But as your database grows, segmentation becomes essential.
On Klaviyo, you can segment based on purchase history, recency of last purchase, average order value, products viewed, and engagement level with your emails. A customer who has purchased three times should not receive the same message as a subscriber who has never ordered. One needs to be rewarded, the other needs to be convinced.
Analyze and optimize
A newsletter improves over time. The indicators to track after each send: the open rate (target around 25 to 35% in e-commerce), the click-through rate (good indicator of interest in your content), the unsubscribe rate (to keep below 0.5%), and the revenue generated directly by the email.
Regularly test different subject lines, different sending times, different content formats. What works for one brand may not necessarily work for another. A/B testing is your best ally for progress without risk.
What The Modern Letter does for your newsletters
Creating an effective newsletter is a profession. It requires mastering strategy, copywriting, design, segmentation, and deliverability simultaneously. At The Modern Letter, that's exactly what we do for e-commerce brands: personalized, elegant, and high-performing newsletters that respect the brand image and truly engage subscribers.
No generic templates. No aggressive promotions. Emails that your customers want to open, and that generate recurring revenue without damaging the customer relationship.
