Many types of cuisine are award winners and require a variety of special ingredients to be flavorful. It would be easy if one award-winning recipe existed for all newsletters, but newsletters, too, are as different as Creole gumbo is from Korean dumplings. One recipe won’t do the trick.
Fortunately, two newsletters can be opposite in every way possible and yet both be well-savored. By figuring out how to combine the right ingredients, whether that’s by trial and error or through more traditional methods, your audience will be quite satisfied. Yes, even if your newsletter doesn’t have great original content …
Ingredient hunters
How can that be? A superior newsletter without great content? While it doesn’t happen often, such newsletters usually point to great content instead of creating their own. They’re ingredient hunters. They sift the crowded Web for a certain spice amidst heaps of home-grown, organic or manufactured ingredients
This can be a great challenge. Let’s just say that it’s easier to find a single green peppercorn among many food groups than it is to find one within a gazillion pounds of other peppercorns. In the same way, the Web has endless pages of content and to find the best ones isn’t an easy task. That’s where the treasure hunters shine. They save time for their readers and get them the sharpest resources — not just picking out any ol’ resource, but by finding resources that represent the topic covered in the newsletter.
ResearchBuzz and Librarian’s Internet Index (LII) New This Week are top notch ingredient hunters. Both newsletters are all about the sites they mention with a summary or commentary for each one. ResearchBuzz often focuses on Internet research and covers a handful of sites in every issue while LII lists over 25 Web sites with a paragraph on each. You could also say meryl’s notes newsletter falls here, too. Though it has an editorial and a sprinkling of humor, the bulk of its content contains links with commentary on each.
A tasty tidbit
Another quality newsletter “food group” is the tasty tidbit. Each issue typically provides one thing: one article, one editorial, one discussion. It doesn’t sound like much, but these newsletters usually have an interesting take on that one thing.
Furthermore, the audience appreciates having just a bite of something to think about. We’re an overloaded society and sometimes just one thing is all we need to be satisfied. Daily Candy is known for this. Each issue talks about one store and what makes it so special.
The Wizard of Ads sends a weekly memo that usually has one article about 500 to 600 words. Dallas TV reporter, Jeff Crilley, sends a publicity-related tip on an irregular basis and it’s worth waiting for.
100 percent homegrown
These newsletters are workhorses because all of their content is homemade. Of course, the others work hard, but in a different type of way. “Homegrown” newsletters have multiple articles in every issue, covering a specific topic or industry.
Absolute Write does this on a weekly basis. Every issue contains an editorial, feature articles, columns, interviews and book reviews. The editor also points to interesting discussions in the newsletter’s forums — a great way to build and feed its community.
The community is so successful that it published a book to help Hurricane Katrina evacuees with all profits going to charity. The result: Stories of Strength and over $3000 in two months.
Another homegrown newsletter comes from Publicity Hound. With each issue, readers get an editorial, a timely topic and story ideas, advice on public relations, “Help This Hound,” where a reader asks for help, and a dog-related joke.
Email newsletter smorgasbord
eNewsletter Journal, Cincom Expert Access, and Shavlik’s Remediator Security Digest fall in this category, and use a variety of food groups. Every issue brings an editorial, an original article, an advice question and answer, and six “peppercorns” from the world of spices. These six best of Web articles cover three topics related to email newsletters and marketing in some way.
The best advice question and answer is a way to involve readers and give them a chance to share their expertise. Readers provide wonderful gems and insight that publishers and writers don’t consider. Inviting readers to share shows them they’re appreciated. What better way to unite the publisher and the reader and acknowledge each other’s existence?
The right amount of spice
While these food groups are different, they have things in common: content and readability. The content — whether it’s their own or the links they point to — is of fantastic quality. Not only that, but it serves the readers exactly what they expect. They ask for a pot of java and get a steaming cup, not tea or soda.
Readability not only refers to language, but also making the content easy to scan by using headers, bolding, white space, and the right size font. Two of the example newsletters given are not even HTML-based newsletters. They do an excellent job in making the most of the text, line breaks, paragraph breaks and symbols like **** to separate sections.
No one says you have to cook an email newsletter rare if you don’t like it that way. Go for how you prefer it. Cook it well done or medium. These examples show newsletters of all kinds succeed by mixing the most important things: content, readability, and topic.