An Email Newsletter Can Be Almost Anything—That's a Good Thing

What is an email newsletter? At its most fundamental level, an email newsletter is a message format that mostly contains non-promotional content that’s of interest to a particular audience. 

That’s as specific as you can get without being overly restrictive. There’s also that mostly in there.

Newsletters generally do include overtly promotional content (such as ads) at least occasionally, if not regularly. That’s fine, but the defining characteristic of a newsletter is that a strong majority of the content isn’t overtly selling. 

Since that’s the defining characteristic, let’s talk first about what that content is doing. 

Types of Non-Promotional Content 

While newsletter content generally doesn’t ask you to open your wallet and spend money, it engages subscribers with content that can build stronger brand affinities and nurture subscribers toward future conversions, either with the operator of the newsletter or its partners and advertisers. In other words, newsletters typically sell indirectly. 

They do that by using one or more types of non-promotional content. Here’s the list of non-promotional content from my book, Email Marketing Rules (4th edition): 

• Instructional (e.g., how-to videos for home improvement or craft projects) 
• Educational (e.g., knowledge sharing) 
• Editorial (e.g., news and trends coverage) 
• Entertaining (e.g., humor, games) 
• Social (e.g., social media content related to your brand, especially user-generated) 
• PR-oriented (e.g., your company’s efforts to be more sustainable, diverse) 
• Cause-related (e.g., your support for charities, social issues) 
• Influencer-driven (e.g., fashion tips from an influencer) 
• Community-related (e.g., popular forum discussions) 
• Progressive profiling efforts (e.g., polls, surveys) 
• Seeking feedback (e.g., rate this email, NPS) 
• Promoting other channels (e.g., links to your social media content, mobile app) 
• Expressions of thanks (e.g., season’s greetings) 

While some newsletters focus exclusively or almost exclusively on one of those content types (especially one of those first four), others include more of a mix. 

The Possibilities Beyond Content 

If the content possibilities weren’t dizzying enough, email newsletters present a variety of other choices to operators. Let’s discuss some of the biggest ones. 

Paid or Free? 

Thanks to services like Substack, paid newsletters are much more common than they used to be. However, free newsletters are the norm. Those are either ad-supported like Morning Brew or they support sales indirectly through brand-building and soft-selling. Email marketing agency ActionRocket’s Email Weekly is a great example of this, as you can see in Issue 568. 

First- or Third-Party Content? 

Most newsletters focus on linking to their brand’s own content. CNN’s newsletters (of which there are 23) link exclusively to CNN content, plus advertisers. Others link out to non-owned sources, like The Hustle, which links to lots of third-party content in addition to linking to its own content and that of its owner, HubSpot. 

Linked or Included Content? 

Traditionally, emails have served as a gateway to content on websites and in apps. Many newsletters lean into that approach. Today two trends are pushing brands to send more destination newsletters, which include all or most of their content in the email itself.  

First, newsletters want to feel more exclusive and private. Including content not found online accomplishes that goal. And second, with tech giants hoovering up all web content to train generative AI models, sharing content only via email is one way to shield your content from becoming training fodder and part of the collective consciousness. The Senses newsletter by Future Commerce and Ann Handley’s Total Annarchy newsletter are great examples of this approach. 

Daily or Less Often? 

While many newsletters are dailies or weeklies, other cadences are not uncommon. For example, The Sense is three times a week and Total Annarchy goes out fortnightly—that is, every two weeks. 

Periodic or Sporadic? 

The norm is certainly that newsletters go out on a regular schedule, so subscribers can anticipate receiving it and build it into their routine. But some have inconsistent schedules, publishing when news happens, when inspiration strikes, or as time permits. 

Ongoing or Limited? 

Most newsletters are launched with the goal of running for a long time. Whether they achieve that or not is another issue. However, some newsletters are designed from day 1 to be short-lived because the topic they’re covering is time-bound or can be fully explored in a set number of issues.  

Solo Stream or Supplemental? 

A newsletter can be the entirety of the mailstream you’re sending, and typically is. But, it can also be supplemental to a promotional mailstream. For example, men’s apparel retailer Chubbies sent 11 issues of its Weekender newsletter to its promotional email subscribers, including one proposing new Summer Olympic events. It’s a fun and engaging way to break up their promotional messages. 

All together, that’s a lot of options! It’s no wonder there’s such a rich variety of email newsletters being published. The possibilities are almost endless, and that’s a good thing for both newsletter operators and newsletter fans.

The challenge is identifying the combination of characteristics that allow you to best meet your goals, align with your capabilities, and attract the desired audience.