What is a Newsletter and Why Your Brand Needs One

One of the most important marketing activities you can focus your efforts on is a newsletter for your brand or organization. Newsletters are the perfect opportunity to connect with your customers and prospects. Newsletters are also an important vehicle to increase customer engagement and retention, while also providing an opportunity to upsell products and services.  Even if your organization isn’t in the business of “selling”, the newsletter has the power to generate engagement. When you have a more engaged audience you will see an increase in web traffic, foot traffic, organization participation or donations, and potentially even an increase in word of mouth referrals.

What is a Newsletter?

A newsletter is a collection of announcements, promotions, special offers, and updates that you want to deliver to your customers, members, and engaged audience. The newsletter program will communicate the updates and value that your business or organization brings to its audience. Building an effective newsletter should be a priority for your entire team, including marketing, design, communications, and operations. The newsletter can become one of your most powerful messaging vehicles, and can provide an opportunity for a regular check-in with your customers that they will learn to expect and engage with.

First and foremost, use the newsletter to highlight your most exciting milestones and content. Establish set newsletter sections in which you can deliver specific content types or storytelling to your readers. Create a newsletter template that showcases your brand logo, color palette, and other unique brand elements that will increase recognition among your audience. The goal of your newsletter is to be a useful and informative message for your audience that they look forward to receiving and consider the newsletter as a valuable benefit of your brand or organization. 

Today’s newsletters are most commonly delivered by email, but you will want to consider whether to offer your newsletter in a few different formats — depending on whether your customers are used to receiving emails, social media updates, or print materials from your organization. The frequency of your newsletter should work for your organization. Determine how frequently you will have new content to share, but don’t force the timing and send a newsletter too often. If you just end up reusing content, you will risk making your newsletter redundant.

Newsletter metrics to watch

Just like all of your other marketing activities, you will want to set goals for your newsletter and watch the metrics to determine areas of opportunity to increase engagement along with what areas of the newsletter are successful. The newsletter stats will help you consider what content types increased email opens or foot traffic, along with email unsubscribes or direct responses from customers. 

For newsletters sent through email or as a digital asset, your stats will be more easily tracked. Pay close attention to:

• Open rate

• Click-through rate

• Website traffic

• Customer geographic location

• Unsubscribes to your email list

In the case of a printed newsletter that is handed out or sent through direct mail, you can measure actions such as:

• Website traffic

• Email sign-ups

• Foot traffic

• Call volume

• Coupon or offer redemption

A newsletter program is also a great way to gauge how strong your customer database is. If you find that many customers in your database open or take an action from your newsletter — then you have an engaged subscriber list, however, if the open or click-thru rates are small — it might be time to improve your content or clean up your database of old and outdated customers or leads. Newsletter programs provide you with a set marketing tactic to engage your customers and also evaluate whether you can improve lead generation or retention tactics to improve the quality of your customer list. 

Issuu’s newsletter program

The marketing team here at Issuu has built a newsletter program that helps us reach customers with product announcements, helpful resources, content spotlights, and more. Over the past few years, the newsletter program has grown to include two different newsletters each sent out monthly to Issuu users around the world. Each newsletter has its own name, theme, and content focus — AMPLIFY and CONNECTIONS, but as a messaging vehicle are both intended to engage and inform Issuu customers while continuing to grow the customer community.

The product and marketing-focused “AMPLIFY” newsletter is the primary messaging vehicle to deliver all the Issuu updates that customers need and want to know. AMPLIFY is also intended to offer helpful content marketing tips to the vast community of content creators. Check out a recent AMPLIFY newsletter. 

The Issuu community is made up of millions of content creators publishing unique and exciting storytelling. The second newsletter “CONNECTIONS” fulfills the brand mission of “connecting content to people”. The “CONNECTIONS” newsletter is intended to showcase the awesome content published on Issuu and demonstrates how storytelling and content can bring people together. Each month “CONNECTIONS” also features a message from Joe Hyrkin, Issuu CEO, to let Issuu customers hear directly from him. Explore a recent CONNECTIONS newsletter. 

To recognize the end of the year, Issuu publishes the “Issuu Year in Review” newsletter to highlight major company and cultural milestones. This newsletter’s goal is to inform our customers about everything Issuu has been up to in the past year, along with providing insights into industry trends, and more. The newsletter is published as a multi-page flipbook on Issuu to fully immerse Issuu customers, media, and industry experts. 

Issuu for newsletters

Not surprisingly, Issuu is a popular format for creating and publishing newsletters for brands and organizations. Only on Issuu can you publish a sleek single-page or multi-page interactive newsletter featuring embedded videos, live web links delivered with satisfying page-turns instead of an endless scroll! The digital flipbook format is a perfect fit for many brands that create engaging newsletters filled with immersive storytelling combined with optimization for viewing on all screen sizes. Plus, newsletters published on Issuu offer a full suite of stats, and the ability to create additional newsletter assets such as individual social stories, email graphics, mobile articles, and more in just a few clicks.

It’s never too late to create a newsletter program for your brand and Issuu is the perfect platform to transform your newsletter content into an immersive experience for your reader. Get even more content marketing tips on the Issuu blog.