Setting up a newsletter for your business

If you have been following digital marketing professionals and gurus online, one of the big things you will hear is the importance of owning the control to access your followers.

This stems from the concept that businesses spend a lot of time attracting the right followers on various social media platforms. However, once you gain those followers after all that work, those followers are still owned by the social media platforms.

Everything from showing your content to your followers to accessing it in various other ways depends on what each social media platform sets the rules for on any given day.

One way to own this audience is to collect their contact details and use email to continue to engage with your audience better. This can be achieved using newsletters.

Newsletters as a platform have expanded a lot over the last few years. Here are a few versions of them:

Internal Newsletters
External Business Newsletters
Paid Newsletters
Sponsored Newsletters

Each newsletter has a specific purpose, and how you structure it depends massively on the objective you are trying to achieve with your business newsletter.

Internal Newsletter:

An internal newsletter is created primarily as a way for you as a business to share information with your internal team members. Depending on the amount of data that you want to share, you could have a single newsletter that you send out to your whole team with information on what’s happening in the business, or you could have a department or location-specific newsletter which only shares the news that is relevant for that particular department or location.

Here is how you can set up an internal newsletter:

Identify the newsletter’s target focus and the platform you intend to use to deploy it. (HubSpot, Mailchimp, Zoho, etc.)
Fix a plan on how frequently you want to deploy this newsletter.
Ensure you add all the team members’ email addresses in the company, department, or location.
Create a template by deciding what content you want to share in this newsletter.
Identify the team members responsible for ideating, researching, writing, and deploying the newsletter. Depending on the newsletter’s scale, one individual could handle all or multiple individuals within the team.
Remember to plan and get the content approved by relevant department heads or management to ensure you keep all information that should be shared with the team.
Test the newsletter before you deploy it to the employees or team members.
Finally, collect feedback and work towards improving the newsletter content and template based on internal reviews and feedback.

External Business Newsletters:

External newsletters are where you, as a business, regularly send out updates, news, or even just information about a particular topic to followers, leads, customers, and vendors as part of your email marketing strategy.

This is slightly more formal (depending on what topics you are covering and your target audience) and will protect mainly information focused on external information like company news or product/service updates.

Most businesses that do not have a newsletter as a business model use this kind of newsletter.

Businesses usually add existing contacts to this or encourage potential leads to subscribe to this newsletter so they can access their emails and reach out to them.

Here is how you can set up an external business newsletter:

Identify the target audience for the newsletter.
Identify the appropriate tool to send the newsletter (tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc.)
Fix a frequency plan on how often you want to send this out. Most businesses look at 30 days, but it can be anything you decide.
Ensure you add all existing contacts to the newsletter contact form.
Create a form to encourage your potential leads to subscribe to the newsletter.
Create a plan for promoting this on various locations, such as the website, social media platforms, and your email signature.
Create a template that you can use to send out this newsletter.
Identify the individuals responsible or individuals within the team who will ideate, research, write, and publish this newsletter at pre-decided intervals.
Remember to get approvals for various types of content from relevant departments (especially account management and sales teams if you want to talk about wins or project completions as a service business).
Make sure to test the newsletter before deploying it to your subscribers.
Finally, collect feedback and make changes to the newsletter according to the feedback from your readers.

Paid Newsletters:

Paid newsletters have become a great way for content creators and experts to share their experiences and new learnings with a focused group of subscribers willing to be part of a community of people paying to get exclusive content from these experts.

There are a few great paid newsletters out there, and one reason they work well is that the experts who write them have a large online following. People are willing to pay to listen to their views and thoughts on various focused topics.

Here is how you can start setting up your paid newsletter:

Create a strategy around what topics you want to cover in your paid newsletter.
Identify how and how much you want to charge for the newsletter.
Identify the platforms you want to use for this newsletter (like Substack, Convertkit, Patreon, etc.).
Identify the frequency of the content you would send out in this newsletter.
Create a landing page to let the audience subscribe to your newsletter (most likely would be taken care of by the platform).
Create a strategy for promoting this landing page and the newsletter to increase subscribers.
Create a template with a place for content that must be sent to your subscribers.
Identify the individuals responsible for ideating, researching, writing, and publishing the newsletter at pre-decided intervals.
Make sure to test the newsletter’s deliverability and readability.
Finally, feedback should be collected, and the newsletter’s content and structure should be improved where possible.

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