Email marketing is one of the most effective methods of connecting with your audience. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of B2B marketers use email as an organic content distribution vehicle. Creating an email newsletter is a customisable, accessible, and cost-effective way to maintain individual touchpoints with your subscribers and helps you share messages, updates and news about your business with consumers faster than ever before.
Whether you’re tracking down unique ideas or looking to create an awesome newsletter your subscribers will love, here are our top 20 newsletter ideas to inspire your next email marketing campaign and increase audience engagement.
Helpful Content Ideas For Email Newsletters
1. Infographics
Want to avoid text-heavy articles for your next newsletter? Infographics are dynamic and compelling ways to help convey information to your audience using visual diagrams, images, graphs and charts. Recent studies have shown that infographics can help improve reading comprehension by up to 50%. They can also help improve content exposure and shareability, increase brand credibility, enhance the readability of text-heavy information and help design complex ideas using visual storytelling.
Grammarly embrace visualised information in this email newsletter example below. And even better, they use their subscribers as the source of the stats – because, let’s face it, we are our own favourite topic!
2. How-to guides
Providing your audience with how-to guides is a highly effective way to capture your audience’s attention by solving an existing problem or issue they may be facing. Since they are usually educational guides for how to use your business’s product or service, they are highly beneficial for significantly increasing user engagement, hence substantially increasing the amount of time that your audience interacts with your newsletter content.
For example, your business could share a video showing your audience how to use your product or service using step-by-step instructions.Take the example from Flywheel, who share their latest free e-book resources to their subscribers. To encourage subscribers to share on socials they offer a commission if any new signups come form their unique affiliate link.
4. Industry trends
One of the most engaging newsletter ideas is to share a unique point of view on a trending industry topic or development. Since industry trends may be fairly technical, you should try to keep updates and opinions as short, simple and straightforward as possible. Newsletter content should always be created and refined with the target audience in mind.
Pinterest share the latest trending pins but tailor the content to subscribers search history and recent pins to encourage active engagement on the platform.
5. Share industry/company report
Your company newsletter can be a great opportunity to share industry reports with customers. Make sure you compress key findings so it is easily skimmable for your readers. Sharing reports like this keep your subscribers in the loop and provides valuable information about the current state of the industry.
We like to share our monthly update on the current Email Marketing Metrics. This valuable report provides a source of truth for subscribers to accurately assess the success of their email campaigns.
Promotional Ideas for Email Newsletter
6. New product launch or release
Your business can take advantage of newsletters to promote and advertise new product launches and releases. You can even attach videos that discuss how to use new products and services in greater detail. This can help communicate the associated benefits of new offerings, and possibly help convert subscribers on a trial basis.
7. Case study or success story
Showing your audience how your product or service has successfully added value in the past makes great content to share with your leads. You can even use email segmentation to determine which case studies and success stories to share with which audience segments, based on their prior purchase history.
Highlighting success stories can also help provide your audience with deeper insight into your business beyond its products and services. This is a valuable opportunity to discuss your core values, introduce team members, showcase strategies for success and inspire potential customers.
8. Behind-the-scenes footage
Behind-the-scenes footage can be a fun way to connect and engage with newsletter subscribers. This may include pictures of employees working on an upcoming project, GIFs that are exclusively shared through your newsletter and videos and montages of organisational happenings and events.
9. Upcoming events and event recaps
Planning on hosting an upcoming event? Your newsletter provides the perfect avenue to promote and invite quality leads who are already interested in your business. This can be an effective way to spread the word and encourage as much participation as possible. Your newsletter could even contain event recaps that discuss the most important information and valuable take-home messages.
10. Holiday greetings
The holidays can be a great time to share success opportunities and general tips for how your customers can leverage the benefits of your products and services. Your newsletter can even be customised to fit the theme of each holiday. We have many professionally-designed templates dedicated to these special holidays in your vision6 account so you’ll have no trouble creating inspiring holiday marketing campaigns.
Philosophy use Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to reach out to subscribers to promote their products as the perfect gift.
Interactive Email Newsletter Content Ideas
11. Polls and surveys
Polls and surveys can allow you to ask your readers questions of interest and collect feedback. They can help your business collect valuable information and insights about which products to release next, what audiences expect from upcoming product launches and updates and feedback regarding existing products and services. You can then address responses and feedback in your next monthly newsletter.
Litmus encourages subscribers to fill out an in-email survey by promising a free resource and tailored content in return. Subscribers are more likely to engage with surveys that are relevant to the topic of interest, instead of just a random poll or survey that’s purely used as a data grab.
12. Competitions
Your company can leverage its next newsletter to conduct interactive competitions and contests. For example, referral contests where readers receive an incentive or prize for every customer they refer. You could even run a series of trivia contests and gift the winner a special voucher they can redeem online or in-store. There’s plenty of room to get creative!
13. Fun Quizzes
Email newsletter tools can help your business easily create and embed quizzes in your next newsletter using pre-made templates. Informative quizzes with multiple-choice questions can be a fun way to interact with your audience while still subtly promoting your business’s products and services.
Unlike polls or surveys, quizzes don’t need to directly relate to your business or products. Take this example by Penguin Random House, void of any promotional content this email is purely for the entertainment of their subscribers.
14. Ask For Feedback
Asking customers for feedback through your newsletter can be a great way to gain actionable guidance and insight about how you can improve your offerings. You can even leverage positive feedback and testimonials in your next mail newsletter to convince prospective customers to purchase.
Out Of The Box Email Newsletter Ideas
15. Source ideas from within
Reaching out to employees for newsletter ideas can help generate innovative ideas that can target your audience more effectively. Speak to your support teams or employees who are directly involved with customers. These employees within your organisation typically have a better idea about what types of content your audiences and prospective customers may enjoy.
16. Share user-generated content
Studies have shown that 93% of customers will consider user-generated content before making a purchasing decision. User-generated content (UGC) can be a source of endless content for your next email newsletter. User-generated content refers to images, videos, blogs, reviews, testimonials or other discussions that customers create and share when using a specific product or service.
If you’re wanting to promote a particular product we always recommend positioning any user-generated content close to your main call-to-action button.
17. Showcase customer testimonials
Studies have shown that approximately 95% of customers read reviews before they purchase a product or service. Therefore, sharing customer testimonials in your email newsletter can be a highly effective way to show your audience proof that your products and services can help solve their problems. Testimonials are especially useful for targeting customers that have not previously purchased anything from your business before.
Testimonials can also help significantly elevate brand reputation, build credibility, and convert prospective leads into loyal customers.
18. Advertise job postings
Another approach to curating your business’s newsletter design is to gather and advertise open positions and vacancies in your organisation. Your email newsletter can often be an extremely valuable distribution channel for announcing and promoting job postings across other businesses.
This can help your business easily identify the most qualified potential candidates from your existing email marketing newsletter network.
19. Share Recommendations
Email newsletter ideas don’t always have to be directly related to your business in order to effectively engage with your customers. Sharing music, book, movie, television show or podcast recommendations through your newsletter can be a fun way to connect with your audience without necessarily promoting a product or service. You could even discuss and review your favourite podcast from that week!
Since the ultimate purpose of a newsletter is to build meaningful relationships with current and prospective customers, communication doesn’t always have to be directly promotional.
Bed Threads uses their newsletter to share customer styling tips as well as provide recommendations on how to style their bedding and homes.
20. Share Your Company Story and Values
Discussing your company’s history can help take readers on a journey from your business’s inception to its current operations to its plans for future success. This not only helps project an image of constant transformation and innovation but can also help your audience understand the role they play in facilitating prolonged success. Creative storytelling can help you communicate your company story without directly promoting a specific product or service.
In this example, global design consultants Edenspiekermann kick off their July newsletter by giving readers an insight into the business beyond a list of products or services. In discussing their values, their team members and their strategies for success, Edenspiekermann can connect with and inspire their audience which would likely be other businesses and industry professionals.
Creating an email newsletter does not always have to be stressful and time-consuming. If you follow these 20 innovative newsletter ideas, you will always have engaging and high-quality content ready to go.
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