How to Generate Stellar Ideas for your Monthly Newsletter

Many people believe that email marketing is dead, but this is not true. In fact, email marketing is seeing a resurgence because many companies are using email marketing the right way. Email marketing is proving to be quite successful for more and more online marketers and companies.

In fact, many small brands are relying on email, content and social media marketing to take care of all their marketing and advertising needs. With modern tools and software, creating aesthetically pleasing email newsletters is very easy.

However, generating ideas and content for e-newsletters is not always that easy. Here are some ways that you can ensure that you always have stellar ideas for your monthly newsletter.

Have clear goals for email marketing

First and foremost, you need to evaluate if your company really needs to create and send newsletters. If you truly believe that email newsletters could be helpful to your company, then you need to plan way before you can actually start email marketing.

In the planning stages of your email marketing campaigns, you need to figure out why exactly your company will be creating email marketing lists and will be sending out newsletters. You could send email newsletters to promote your brand, inform your customers, keep them updated, increase web traffic, re-engage customers, improve social media marketing campaigns, nurture prospects and customers.

Each of these different goals requires different ideas and different types of content. Having clear goals for email marketing and e-newsletters will help you generate ideas every month for your email newsletters.

Look at classic types of content for your e-newsletters

When you find that you and your team are having trouble creating content and generating ideas for your e-newsletters, you can always fall back on evergreen content types to come up with ideas and to create engaging content for your email newsletters. You can interview industry leaders and experts, create profiles of thought leaders and legends, write product reviews and do market analysis for your newsletters. You can make your e-newsletters more fun by adding quizzes, puzzles and games and also by publishing articles and stories that your customers will love.

You can make any type of content interesting by putting it in the form of lists. You can also create content that you think your readers will like, which is something that Medium does really well. However, you need to make sure to keep the content easy to read as the design of the e-newsletter is also important, next to the quality of the content.

Coca Cola produces one of the best newsletters that are designed beautifully and have just the right amount of useful and promotional content. Some experts agree that you should have 90 percent useful and 10 percent promotional content in your e-newsletters. Moreover, there should be a lot of white space and the design should not be busy as to distract the readers away from the content.

Give useful tips that are related to your service

Tips and tricks are always a winner as long as they are related to the product and service.

Take for example a celebrity cook you see on The Food Channel. Those cooks can share quick recipes or even kitchen tips in an email newsletter. From that basis it is only a small step to sell cookbooks, instructional video lessons, branded cooking equipment. Or you could do like Gathar on a similar topic and fill your the blog with lots of additional information arround occasions, parties, cooking.  To know all about getting a private chef at home  is something that every foodie in us would appreciate. :D.

The nuance is the difference between cooking yourself or catering – but that is an important one to distinguish. Similarly someone that makes paintings, should the write teaching others to paint? They should if they want to attract other painters, otherwise a different content tactic is needed.

Compelling original content

You should realize that newsletters are not just promotional items with a little bit of content. Many organizations and brands have been able to distinguish themselves from their peers with only their e-newsletters. If one of your goals is to establish your company as a thought leader, you need to create original content for your e-newsletter. This is not hard to do if your e-newsletters are sent out monthly. One of the best ways to create original content is to hire content writers, who can create great and unique content for your company.

Some of the most informative newsletters come from science and technology organizations like MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Singularity Hub and Futurity.org. Such organizations are able to find the best and cutting edge news stories in the world of science and are able to report on them in their online newsletters. The main reason why their newsletters are so successful is because they are able to provide content that no one else can. Even major news outlets do not cover the kind of stories that they do. You can do the same by finding breaking news and interesting stories in your industry that no one else is covering.

You can choose to provide your opinions and have your company take a stand on news items or you can choose to remain neutral like Quartz does with its newsletters. When you choose to cover news items, you will always have ideas for your newsletters and you won’t have to create themes every month for your newsletters. Make sure that the news items in your newsletters are sourced correctly and that all fact checking is complete before publishing them.