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The Four Varieties of E mail Newsletters

The 4 Types of Email Newsletters

Email newsletters have made a smart comeback last year.

While highly successful newsletters like Morning Brew (over 1 million subscribers) and The Skimm (over 7 million subscribers) have been on "send" for years, we're all just starting to wipe our old, retired newsletters.

In the digital age of advertising flooding, something is sold to us everywhere.

So marketers recognize that customers who give a lot of "value" without asking for anything in return (except of course an email address 😉) are more than happy to invite us into their inboxes and read our newsletters while they are sipping coffee tomorrow.

Each of the following 4 types of email newsletters has the same foundation. In return for the fact that we are allowed to send emails, we give value.

What is worth?

Information that your customer considers relevant or useful.

Depending on how you would like to compile this information (and how large your team is), we will show you the most important types of newsletters that are currently distributed on the Internet. Foreword: These are not the only newsletter templates available. However, you can get started with these templates if you are not yet familiar with sending newsletters.

Ready to send?

Here are the 4 main types of email newsletters.

# 1: "Letter-from-the-Editor" or "Featured Article" style

This type of newsletter is best for:

  • Marks with something to say and / or to score points
  • Companies that want to take a stand to do something in their industry (give an opinion, give tactical advice, etc.)
  • Companies that are willing to spend more resources and time creating a valuable newsletter

For this type of newsletter, you must either be a decent author or hire one. Other types of email newsletters do not require you to be a good author (see below) certainly does.

Just because you can write doesn't mean you should write forever. This type of email newsletter can contain more than 200-2,000 words. It only depends on the topic and how committed your audience is to reading long content.

Here is an example of a short e-mail newsletter in the style of a letter from the editor:

This is less than 200 words and yet as effective as a longer, editor-style newsletter. As long as the following basics are covered, your subscribers will love reading your newsletter alongside their morning cup of coffee.

  • Why is this important for my subscribers?
  • Is that valuable to my subscribers?
  • Is this topic relevant to my industry?
  • Is that enough to get my subscribers to read?

(NOTE: Do you need support in your digital marketing efforts? Or do you just want to implement proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics and templates in your company? Find out about the latest offerings from DigitalMarketer and you're on your way to helping your business grow.)

# 2: "Link" or "Curated Content" style

This type of newsletter is best for:

  • Brands and companies that want to offer their customers quick added value
  • Companies that rely on time and the power of people

This style of newsletter is for companies who either do not have the resources to write letter-to-publisher-style newsletters, or do not have the resources. Here's the thing – just because you don't write long, storytelling newsletters don't mean you don't do a great job with your newsletters.

You can continue to upgrade your list using the "Link" or "Curated Content" style newsletter.

There is only one thing that you CANNOT confuse with this newsletter style. When choosing this style, it is very important that you ensure that you provide context for each link. The mere sending of links is not sufficiently differentiated. You need to explain why your subscribers should care about the content you link to.

These links can be internal links (i.e. your own content) or external links (i.e. the content of other people).

Here is an example of an email newsletter in the style of a link or curated content:

# 3: "Blog" style

This type of newsletter is best for:

  • Brands with their own blog and / or table of contents
  • Companies that want to drive a lot of traffic to their content

The blog style email newsletter has only one goal and one goal. They try to direct traffic to certain websites. This is a short, expressive font that makes people read the links you provide.

A quick tip is that you don't necessarily have to create a link to a blog, just point to wherever you keep content (e.g. YouTube channel, medium profile, etc.).

You can think of the newsletter as a “blog” style as a mixture of the “link” style and the “letter-from-the-editor” style. While you're sure not to write 2,000 words to explain why users should consume the linked content, you're still showing the value behind the click.

Here is an example of a blog style email newsletter:

# 4: "Hustle" style

This type of newsletter is best for:

  • Brands with a dedicated content team that can really put everything on paper
  • Companies that are big on the affiliate side of marketing
  • Companies that want to establish themselves as THE AUTHORITY in their industry

The "hustle" style requires that you are or are a great writer on your team. You will use your newsletter to link internal and external content. Everything focused on different topics in your niche.

This style is difficult to tell stories, just like the style of editorial writing. You can even imagine this email newsletter style as a collection of mini-editorial letters that are combined into a newsletter.

Short tip: Make sure that the image of your first email is not too large. This can affect deliverability, send your emails to the spam folder and affect your opening rates (booooo!).

Here's an example of a Hustle-style email newsletter:

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, you don't have to follow these styles up to a "t". Each of these email newsletter styles is a great place to start, and your subscribers will show you what they really like to see based on their opening rates, link clicks, and even your forwarding rate.

If you subscribed to DM Insider, you may find these email newsletter styles familiar.

We use a combination of different styles in our weekly DM Insider emails, which are only sent to our Insider List.

These subscribers receive the following information weekly:

The first section is in the proofreading style of an featured article that consists of original content from DigitalMarketer.

The second section is the "Link" style, which we call Inside Five. There are 5 links, each with a paragraph that explains why the linked content is valuable to the subscriber. This section was very useful for the DM Insider newsletter template.

We added it to ensure that a subscriber who is not specifically referring to the content of the recommended article (i.e. the recommended article focuses on Instagram marketing and not advertising on Instagram) is given the opportunity to add value to others related topics of digital marketing.

The last section of the DM Insider newsletter deals with sponsored content and sweets. Sponsored content relates to a tool we are committed to (and which is not currently paid for in advertising). These are the tools that the DM team uses and you also want to know about.

The candy content is a collection of swipe files with great marketing strategies in the wild. These are headlines, advertisements, emails, everything that caught our eye and made us think – wow, that's good marketing.

Okay, we think you are about to hit this nice "send" button and publish your first email newsletter. All you have to do is figure out which newsletter style (or combination) best suits your audience and goals, and you're ready to become the next Morning Brew, The Skimm or DM Insider.

(NOTE: Do you need support in your digital marketing efforts? Or do you just want to implement proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics and templates in your company? Find out about the latest offerings from DigitalMarketer and you're on your way to helping your business grow.)