Your Business Newsletter Needs a Better Strategy
Ok, so you know that your business needs an email newsletter, and you’re ready to start, but wait! Before you start sending out what equates to email ads, let’s talk strategy.
One of the most valuable aspects of a newsletter is that it is a chance to build your community. Customers who feel that they are a part of a community are more loyal and are more likely to be repeat buyers, post UGC, and recommend your business to friends and family.
How to Build a Community with a Newsletter
As we discussed in Does my Business Need a Newsletter?, open and engagement rates are high on newsletters because your subscribers opted in to receive them. They want to hear from you. But how do you retain their interest and get them excited to read your newsletter?
You focus on building a symbiotic relationship with them. Both you and your subscribers should benefit from the newsletter. If we are looking at the three Rs of building brand loyalty— rewards, relevance, and recognition— then you can start to work out a plan.
Rewards
One of the best ways to give back to your subscribers is by offering discount codes in the newsletters. If you’re showing them a new product, offering a discount code, or offering them pre-orders for products that might sell out fast, would be a huge benefit to them. It would make them feel like they are a special part of your business.
Relevance
In this article, I explored the trends I think we can expect to see in content for 2026. One of the trends I talked about was transparency. A good example of this in branding now would be Vital Farms eggs. They put a little newspaper in the carton, telling buyers about their farm and their chickens. Another example is Stumptown coffee. They dedicate a really impressive amount of space on their website to information about sourcing, brewing and roasting, and their producers.
If you have customers who cared enough to subscribe, they probably would love to learn more about your values as a company. Depending on your industry, offering educational content, new studies, recipes, mood boards, insider information, or tutorials could be a great way to build community and make your subscribers excited to read your next newsletter.
Recognition
This step is so easy to fit into a newsletter that it really makes you realize how low the bar has been set by big companies. People want to feel seen. If you have the ability to personalize the newsletter by using the subscriber’s name, do that. If you can give them targeted ads, great, or just thank them for reading at the end (and give them a little discount, to bring it back to rewards).
How an Email Newsletter can Address the Buyer Journey
Sometimes, people sign up for newsletters from aspirational brands before they buy. Other times, they’ve made a one-time purchase. Others will be repeat buyers. With a newsletter, it’s easy to speak to multiple parts of the buyer journey.
Awareness
When the subscriber is in this stage, they’re just beginning to explore their options. Maybe it’s a repeat customer looking to upgrade or try something new, maybe it’s someone who signed up to learn more as they began their search. Either way, now is the time to show them what you offer in broad strokes. What are you offering? What problems does your product solve? Why should your company be considered?
Consideration
This is when the subscriber can begin narrowing down their options. They are using the newsletter as a tool to help them make their decision based on things like value, features, and also if they like the company itself.
By sharing content that highlights what sets your product or company apart, you’re helping them with this process. Try to share content around sales or subscriber discounts, new or updated features, and upcoming products.
Decision
Your subscriber is ready to make a choice. To speak to them at this stage, subscriber discounts, highlighting particularly good reviews, and sharing content that reinforces your reputation can have a huge influence. Make the choice as easy as possible by including links to buy within the email.
Timing Matters
The only real way to figure out what time works best for open rates is to experiment. Keep track of the times and engagement that each newsletter gets and work from the results. Try to consider when your buyer will be most likely to open emails. If you’re a business solution product, weekday mornings might be best. If you’re a CPG company, maybe Friday evenings or Saturday mornings.
The key is not to overload your subscribers. A newsletter is best done once a month. Smaller ads or announcements can always go out at other times during the month, but a full newsletter most likely won’t get read each week. You can always absorb announcements that were sent out into the email. Maybe you announced an event and you want to talk about how it went in the newsletter. Or maybe you sent out an ad for a discounted rate for a product, link the product and mention that it’s still discounted or that it’s sold out with dates it will return.
Like a lot of content, a newsletter without a strategy is a waste of time and resources. With the right strategy, though, you can use them to build a community, help your subscribers through a buyer journey, and increase not just sales but loyalty as well.
Looking for a little nuance in your newsletter? Schedule a free discovery call and let’s talk strategy.
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