Newsletters aren’t just about finding something to say once a month and hoping people click. At their best, they’re strategic storytelling devices. They help you share useful information with customers and prospects in a format that’s easy to read, easy to understand, and, ideally, useful enough that they’d actually miss it if it stopped arriving.
For me, a good newsletter should tell people something about your industry, your business, your products, or your customers that they wouldn’t easily get anywhere else. It’s about getting your story out into the market, but doing it in a way that gives the reader something back.
If you’re going to mention products, try not to just say “here’s a product, please buy it”. Can you teach people something new, different, or genuinely useful about it? Can you explain where it came from, why it exists, what problem it solves, or why people use it in a certain way? Sometimes the most ordinary product has a decent story behind it, you just have to dig a little.
If you’re struggling for content, post roundups are often a good place to start. They work particularly well for small, local businesses because you don’t always need to invent a big campaign. You can simply pay attention to what your customers already care about.
And if you’re a local business, your local area is your superpower. Locality and community are two of the strongest drivers of relevance in newsletter content, so don’t sleep on them. Talk about what your customers are talking about. Promote the events they go to. Share a bit of local history. Mention the things that make your town, village, city, or region feel familiar to the people reading.
The other useful thing about newsletters is that, with clever calls to action, you can start to understand what your customers actually engage with. Which links do they click? Which topics get a response? Which offers are ignored? Over time, that starts to tell you what kind of content you should create more of.
So when I’m deciding what to write in a newsletter, I’m not just looking for “content”. I’m looking for the useful story. The thing that helps, explains, teaches, reminds, or connects.
And if you’re really struggling with newsletter copywriting, it might be worth talking to a small agency like Yorkshire Writers. They’re the people behind this Digital Garden, so I probably would say that, but still… newsletters are exactly the sort of thing that benefit from a bit of outside thinking.
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