You Ask, I Answer: How to Make a Great Email Newsletter?

In today's episode, Audrey asks, What do you look for in a good email newsletter? Are there any you just love and can't wait to receive? Any that you signed up for that just fell flat? This is a great question and an important one because the answer is very different depending on the subscriber's intent. So there's the producer of the newsletter side and the subscriber side.

Broadly speaking, email newsletters are going to fall into two buckets, uh, educational and entertaining. And every newsletter is almost certainly going to be a blend of those two, but what that blend is, what that mix is dependent on both the subscribers and the producers. Now, what kind of newsletter a person subscribes to is incredibly uh dependent on their intent. So if you are publishing an email newsletter, if you're trying to create one for business purposes, you have to know what kind of audience either you have or you want to have. One of the tricks that I do for that is to look at your social audience, look at what they post, and you know, just do a sample of you know a random mix of a hundred posts and look at how much entertainment versus education uh people are trying to publish out there in the world.

And it gives you a sense of what they share uh and and how entertainment or education focused they are. Now, if you're trying to produce a great email newsletter, or even just a good one, one that doesn't suck, um, you need to have a a few other things as well. You have to be clear on your intent. What is your intent? Do you want to entertain or do you want to educate?

Do you want to do both? Can you do both well? Um, in the email newsletters I publish, I publish two of them. Uh, my personal email newsletter almost timely, and in the headlights, the the Trust Insights newsletter. And uh I don't go for entertainment because as it that to me is that's not my background.

I don't have any formal training, and so uh I focus really on the education aspect because processing data is what I do. Um second question: what frequency do you want to publish? There is no wrong frequency uh other than what is the maximum frequency you can publish at while still retaining quality, while still producing something that people want to read and enjoy reading. For some people that's monthly, and that's okay. You know, um there's it that's better than nothing as long as it's quality.

For other publications, there are some that publish three times a day, and they maintain quality that way. But they they create a lot of content, and as long as it's useful, it it fulfills the the mission, then great. Uh length is another consideration, how much content and what kinds of content go into uh your newsletter. Your best bet for making a newsletter is to create content um that is scalable in the sense that you can produce a newsletter relatively quickly and at at the frequency you choose, um, but has anything from a basic template all the way to to uh having machines really put together a a good chunk of it. Uh about two-thirds of my newsletter is generated by uh software uh that I wrote because I couldn't just create a the whole thing, and then there's about a third of it is custom that I build every issue.

Uh I publish weekly. Some companies publish daily, some companies publish three times a day. Depends on on your company and what you can do. The third is personality. What personality does your newsletter speak with?

Generally speaking, the better newsletters have a personality to them. Either one person who's writing them and you're getting that person's perspective, or there's an editorial board, but it still has the voice of a person. Remember that a newsletter, my friend Ann Hanley, who publishes a terrific newsletter, you can find it at anhanley.com. Um often talks about how companies focus too much on the news and not enough on the letter. And so if you can write with the intent of it being one person communicating to another, um, because it that's the way it's read.

Newsletters are a lot like podcasts, right? They're not something that is a communal thing. You read that as a one-to-one communication, just like a podcast. You're listening to another person. Um you're not it people don't communally listen to podcasts for the most part.

So your personality should reflect that when you're typing out your newsletter, when you're creating a newsletter, it should reflect I, as the creator, am writing to you, writing a letter to you, the reader, one person at a time. The fourth consideration is the specific topic. What is your newsletter about? Um be very specific and clear on this so that you can tell what does and does not go into the newsletter. Um the best newsletters, the ones that I love are very specific.

They are clear on their intent. There's no question. When I sign up for this newsletter, I know exactly what I'm getting. Uh Katie Martell publishes a great marketing newsletter. Anne Hanley's newsletter is writing a lot about uh uh writing these days.

Jeremy Singer Vine's data is plural newsletter is all about data sets you can take a look at. Scott Monty's is all about uh general business strategy, help a reporter out is all inquiries from reporters who need help with stories. Morning Brew is all about mostly finance and business. Uh so these are examples of very clear topics, very clear intent by the publishers, whether they're individual or organizational, um, for the readers. Like this is what you get, and and there's no question that if you want a newsletter that covers X, this is the source to go for it.

Where companies go wrong is when you read their newsletter, if you scratched off the logo, would you have any idea it was that company's newsletter, or would it just be some like random generic newsletter? Um that personality is really really important. In terms of testing out your newsletters, the thing that I recommend is the same as podcasts. Could you from memory resubscribe to all the newsletters you subscribe to right now? Try it as an exercise.

I don't mean like unsubscribe for everything. I just mean to get a uh open a new text document, get out a post-it note, whatever, and list out the ones that you can remember that you subscribe to by name, and then compare it to what you actually get. And that is your benchmark. And the same the your goal as a producer is to be on that short list of things that people actually remember signing up for. If your newsletter isn't at that point, you have more work to do.

You have more work to do to make it more memorable. Either the brand itself, like mine is called almost timely, um, or the content or the person behind it. Like I subscribe to Anne's newsletter. Okay, I can remember that. Uh do I subscribe to Johnny's newsletter?

Gosh, I don't know if I do. Do I? That's an example of where that newsletter has not done a good job, a good enough job with branding to be memorable, to be trustworthy. So that's what good from my point of view goes into a good email newsletter. Have as someone who's been publishing an email newsletter of some kind for uh almost 20 years now.

You need to have those things. Clear purpose, frequency, length, personality, and very specific topic. As always, uh, please uh leave comments below and please do subscribe to the YouTube channel in the newsletter, and all the links for the newsletters mentioned in this episode are in the show notes on the blog. Go to Christopher S. Penn.com slash blog, find this episode, how do you make a great new email newsletter, and you can get all the links if you want to subscribe to these newsletters as well.

Thanks for watching. Talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.