Media marketing : The 1001 ways of cooking up your ideal newsletter

The newsletter is now at the heart of the digital strategy of most media companies today. By reaching your subscribers directly in their mailbox, you will definitely engage them with your brand, disseminate your content and boost your Web traffic leading them gracefully to conversion. Most online media and classical print media have turned their attention to designing all sorts of newsletters, varying the type of content, the thematic, the frequency or the time of delivery. And according to all metrics, newsletters clearly pay off. So should you still be undecided, go for it.

Now the question is “which content should I put in my newsletter given that I have between 5 and 20 slots to fill?” This is a tough question especially for news media where there are many articles published every day, let alone the tons of articles that you have stored in your data lake. Let us help you in the process of designing a terrific newsletter by giving you ideas of the type of content that you can choose from.

1. Freshest articles: offering to your subscribers the most recent articles is clearly the most natural strategy to follow especially in the news industry. A clear advantage is that the process is actually very easy to automate, alleviating your teams of a tedious task. Now the drawback may be that, because this is hot content, your subscribers are likely to have already heard of it by the time they receive their newsletter.

2. Articles carefully chosen by your editorial staff: this might be the solution that editorial staff like the most as this is a great way to make sure that your newsletter reflects the editorial line. This is a clear advantage. The disadvantage is that you have no guarantee whatsoever that your subscribers haven’t read them yet. Even worse, your editorial staff are wasting their time on this task rather than investigating and writing.

3. Cold articles: your newsletter can be a great place to put some of your old articles back to life. While they have been published before, it might be very relevant to publish them again for instance if they are related to current articles. On the one hand, this represents a great opportunity to leverage your data lake. On the other hand, one has to dig the articles up, link them to new articles and label them.

4. Online social networks articles: those are the articles that have been the most seen, shared or commented on your social platforms. Most of the time, those are very popular articles. So it is very likely that your subscribers have already seen them. Obviously, because of their popularity, they are very likely to be appreciated and clicked on. Be careful though: while your click rate metric might go up, those are not necessarily the articles that make your brand shine the most.

5. Geo-localized articles: we all like to know about what is going on around us at particular location. Your readers might really enjoy local news about their favorite city and this type of article should improve the customer experience. However, this is assuming that you know about their favorite cities. Even though you are able to identify their location, this might not necessarily be the place that interests them the most.

6. Own promotion: your newsletter might be an excellent place for you to advertise your own offers like your subscription offer or your services. Clearly, this could help you to get your newsletter subscriber to subscribe to other digital offers or services. Be careful though, some subscribers might not be that fond of this advertising flavor.

7. Explicit choices of your subscribers: should the option be available when one subscribes to your newsletter, this can be a great leverage. However, this works out only and only if your subscribers have indeed ticked their favorite categories (most of us cannot be bothered). And there is always the risk that your subscribers have specified their choices once and never got back to them, running into the risk of them being stuck with their initial choices.

8. Sponsored articles: This represents an opportunity to monetize your newsletters. You should be aware though that those articles will not contribute to increasing your traffic, nor the engagement of your subscribers with your brand. In any case, pay special attention to the quality of those articles.

9. Ads: same pros and cons of sponsored articles. A good way to monetize your newsletter to trade with the danger of upsetting your subscribers. After all, they subscribed for your newsletter, not the ads.

10. Personalized content: what could be better than providing your subscribers with articles that match their interests and which they haven’t discovered yet? Clearly, this is a great way to improve the user experience, to significantly boost your traffic (up to 3 times) and to engage your subscribers with your brand. You might be thinking that this would be a tedious task for your staff. Luckily though, an algorithm that can personalize the customer experience while preserving the editorial line and avoiding bubbles of interest can achieve this process smoothly. Last but not least, the automated process will alleviate your teams from the burden of choosing the right content.

You are now all set for designing the ideal newsletter (by the way, you can apply pretty much all the things above to videos). Now the next thing to do is to adopt the perfect tool that will allow you to juggle all those kinds of contents, reorganize them in your newsletters and closely monitor your KPI in the process. Stay tuned 😉