Email newsletters: A primer

Email newsletters are an important tool in the publishing toolkit, with a set of diverse uses for your enterprise. Email is one of the few ways — and perhaps the most important way — that news organizations can reach audiences digitally outside their own site. You control virtually the entire experience, including the tone, timing, content and design. And you have access to powerful analytics that can inform the product over time.

But first you have to decide what exactly you hope to accomplish. Are you trying to offer a distinct, self-contained reading experience? Or are you trying to encourage audiences to come to your site?

You must grasp both the broad and specific technical, editorial and management skills necessary for effective email. You must understand how newsletters function and the mechanics necessary to send them. A good newsletter requires a valuable commodity in newsrooms: time. So you’ll also learn more about what’s required to consistently produce a good newsletter. Skill and discipline are required to build and grow an email subscriber list, which also requires technical expertise and tracking digital metrics.

Email is also a tool that can deepen your audience’s engagement with and loyalty to your newsroom. Email has a range of powerful analytics that can help you improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. But to determine if your newsletters are working, you need to track more than open and click-through rates.

Finally, you need to grasp the different ways to directly or indirectly create a new revenue stream with email.