10 more content ideas for your email newsletter

 

Email newsletters are a great way to maintain customer contact and build relationships, but coming up with new ideas every month can be tough.

 

However, if you can keep up a steady stream of useful, relevant or entertaining content, your readers will keep clicking on your emails.

Following on from Mark's first 10 content ideas, he gives us another 10 quick and simple ideas that you can easily adapt to your email newsletters and reader's interests to keep them hooked.

1. Educational content

Consider using your newsletter to build up a glossary or knowledge base. Many publishers have a 'word of the week' feature.

2. 'Best of...'

Look back at what proved most popular with readers in the past and consider producing a 'best of newsletter' edition every now and then. Don't overdo it as people will inevitably tire of repeat content.
Timeless material produced early on in the life of your newsletter probably reached a mere fraction of your current readership.
Dig a little into the subscriber numbers and subscription lengths and you might find a wealth of material that's effectively new to the majority of the recipients.
'Best of' content also makes a great solution in an emergency...when you're stuck for content.

3. Surveys / feedback request

Another great solution for emergencies (and other times) is the reader survey or a request for specific feedback.
You might do this to give readers a welcome chance to help guide the future direction of the newsletter. Or you can ask them for opinions or feedback on other topics.
Of course, the results of such a survey are themselves valuable content for another issue. So you might survey IT professionals on the main problems they face in their job and then summarise the answers in a nice article a couple of issues later.

4. Event recommendations

Point people at useful events both on or offline – webinars, conferences or workshops for example.

5. Resource links

Some newsletters are based entirely around the idea of pointing people to useful resources elsewhere on the Internet.
Nearly every business person has a problem with time (i.e. not enough of it), so sifting through the online morass to pick out the most useful links is a service everyone appreciates.
Direct people to third-party websites, articles, online tools etc. they are likely to appreciate...ideally with a short explanation of why you think these resources are worth noting.

6. Amusing or inspirational anecdotes, stories and quotes

Not suited as the main focus of a B2B newsletter, but good to sprinkle in now and then.

7. Answering feedback

Consider creating a dedicated newsletter section for answering reader questions. The latter can usually kick start your creativity, give you a chance to demonstrate expertise and make readers (rightly) feel like you're actually listening.
Indeed, your readers can be a wonderful source of content in themselves, if you can persuade them to contribute their own articles, jokes, comments, interviews, tips, questions, testimonials and more.
Whole newsletters can be built solely on reader input (think of discussion lists).

8. Interviews

Interviews are like picking a topic and getting someone else to write the article. You can interview people from within your organisation, a reader, a customer or an expert in some related aspect of business.
Don't underestimate the effort you need to put in though. Considered thought needs to go into the choice of interview partner, the interview topic and the questions themselves. And if the interview is verbal, you'll need time to transcribe and edit the recording.

9. News

Reporting relevant industry news is safe but unlikely to be a genre-busting success in terms of establishing your newsletter as a unique read – unless you do it very well indeed.

10. Statistics and lists

Take a look at any media site publishing practical articles and the most popular pages usually carry titles like 'Top 5 ways...', 'Ten tips for', 'Seven steps to...'
People like numbers and people like lists; 'Top 10 challenges faced by IT staff', 'Top five reasons to change jobs NOW', 'Top 5 email clients for your mobile phone' etc.
Benchmarking and industry statistics always go down well. Particularly if you can aggregate numbers from various sources, saving people the time and effort of doing so themselves.

To view Mark's first 10 newsletter content ideas from our November newsletter click here. To read Mark's article about B2B newsletter content management from our October newsletter click here