Email marketing is an effective way to reach out to current and prospective customers.
A good newsletter can turn your subscriber’s inbox into a marketing vehicle and can also be used to inform and educate your audience. Publishers and business owners often use newsletters to draw attention to the best content on their website. This content might include articles, images, and videos.
Editorial newsletters serve an essential purpose for publishers: readers may miss the news and other stories posted on a site, and newsletters bring the most important content to subscribers’ inboxes so they don’t miss a thing.
So, how does one create a good editorial newsletter? In this guide, we will discuss how you can create editorial newsletters that your readers will love.
What is an editorial newsletter?
Publishers typically use editorial newsletters to curate information from their site and send it to subscribers in digest form.
The content might include what the editors consider their best articles of the month, important company announcements, or other resources. We can compare editorial newsletters to the “editor’s pick” section we see in newspapers and magazines.
The editorial content is sent in an email along with images and videos and gives the reader a snapshot of the website’s recent content. These newsletters are a great way to use email newsletter marketing to reach out to your audience and keep them informed about your business.
4 Tips for creating outstanding editorial newsletters
From weekly newsletters to daily round-ups, editorial newsletters are a great way to engage with your audience and keep them in the know about your brand. This section will look at four ways you can create excellent newsletters to connect with your audience.
1. Create mobile-friendly editorial newsletter
Having a strong mobile presence is no longer a nice-to-have – it is now essential. Simply put, your marketing emails need to be mobile-friendly if you want your subscribers to open and read them.
A recent study suggests that mobile opens make up about 46% of all email opens. With more and more people choosing to use mobile devices over desktop or laptop computers, this figure is bound to increase even further.
Your editorial newsletter should use a mobile-friendly template that considers the space constraints of smaller screens. The text should be concise, and the headlines should be eye-catching to draw your readers’ attention.
Use a high-quality, appealing image that’s large enough so the reader doesn’t need to zoom in. You only have a few seconds to leave an impact on your subscribers, and good design will help you make an immediate impression.
2. Personalize your editorial email newsletter
Since your editorial email newsletter is a curated collection of content and media, it should have a personal touch so that it doesn’t read like a generic marketing communication.
First, segment your audience by demographics or behavior so you can offer content that appeals to specific groups. Doing this ensures that your newsletter offers something of value to your subscribers.
Second, personalize the email text to make it sound like a direct message to the reader. Use your recipients’ names in the email body or the subject line to make it more personal. You can also add the editor’s name as the sender of the email to give the impression that it’s an actual direct email from one person to another. This makes the recipient feel valued.
3. Curate relevant content
Once you segment your audience and know what each group prefers to read, you need to curate content that’s relevant to each segment. One way to do this is by creating different templates with different articles for each group. Another way to do this is by creating content around themes like the holidays, recent trends, or breaking news.
One of the best examples of creating themed content comes from Buzzfeed, which has separate email newsletters that cater to parents, kids, food-lovers, and various other groups, with different types of content for each audience segment.
Even if you don’t have the sheer content-generating power of Buzzfeed, you can still replicate the format of its yearly editorial newsletter in your own newsletters or use other themes. For example, why not do a Christmas edition?
Also read: 6+ Powerful Christmas Email Subject Lines
4. Use the right tone
An editorial newsletter’s purpose is what sets it apart from other forms of email marketing. With an editorial newsletter, the company is seeking to inform its subscribers, not promote a product or service.
Keeping the tone of your newsletter light and conversational will help maintain that focus on educating and entertaining the customer. You should shy away from using a formal tone with your readers and go for a more informal tone that makes it seem like a conversation between friends.
Avoid too much jargon, as the text should capture the reader’s interest to read more and not seem confusing. Here, having some editorial guidelines would help so that your newsletters are consistent. If your magazine is tackling complex issues, test, and see the response to your text.
Pro tip: set some time aside in your scheduling app to bring your editorial team together and assess how your content is doing. Alternatively, you can manage your employee scheduling on an excel spreadsheet. Here’s a handy Excel template if you decide to take this approach.
Running A/B tests on your newsletter will help you decide which layout, format, and tone make the newsletter more accessible to your audience.
The example above from Finimize skips the jargon and simplifies financial topics for its readers. Adding the reading time to the newsletter is also a nice touch as many of Finimize’s subscribers run on tight schedules. Just like Finimize, you’ll also want your readers to feel that your content is worth their time.
Bottom line
Editorial newsletters are an excellent way of promoting your website content, giving your readers the latest industry news, and building relationships. Personalize your newsletter according to your readers’ preferences, and always remember to write to inform, not to sell. Even if your newsletter promotes text-based content, avoid using text-heavy templates. Instead, use more images to get your readers interested.
As you start a conversation with your readers, keep your tone professional and conversational. You can take different approaches to curate your newsletter content, such as publishing a round-up of all new articles, focusing on a single theme, or hyper-personalizing featured content based on customer segments. Remember to keep testing to find a mix that works for your audience.
The tips we’ve just discussed will help you deliver relevant, actionable content to your subscribers and make them fans of your brand for life. Best of luck with your editorial newsletter!
Also read:
- 10 Architecture & Interior Design Newsletter Examples
- 10 Inspirational Fintech Newsletter Examples
- 7 Nonprofit Newsletter Template Examples
About author
Owen Jones is the Senior Content Marketer at ZoomShift, an online schedule maker app. He is an experienced SaaS marketer, specializing in content marketing, CRO, and FB advertising.
