Of the 8 billion residents of Earth, there are more than 4 billion email users (Statista).
That means 50% of the global population currently uses email on a regular basis.
By 2025, this number is expected to reach 4.6 billion people.
And you’re probably one of them.
Maybe you’ve subscribed to a few, benefited from many or even contemplated starting yours.
Well, this blog will provide all the answers you need on what a newsletter is, how to use it, and why it’s relevant, complete with tips and examples.
Let’s start.
What is a Newsletter?
Newsletters are written messages that are usually sent via email.
It’s an avenue to share useful updates, valuable insights, and even resources with a targeted audience that has chosen to receive it.
These are people who care about what you do and who could eventually buy your service.
Anyone can start a newsletter, leveraging it to grow communities, land clients, and share valuable resources.
Types of Newsletters (and Which Might Work for You)
Now that the question of What a newsletter is is out of the way, we can discuss the different kind of newsletters out there.
Not all newsletters work the same or give the same exact results.
Choosing the perfect fit absolutely depends on what you do, who your audience is, and, more importantly, the kind of value you intend to share.
Here are a few practical ones you can use:
1. Educational Newsletters
The goal of educational newsletters is to teach.
You can do this by breaking down topics, sharing valuable insights, or providing step-by-step guides on a complex topic.
This type of newsletters help you to brand as a credible, helpful and reliable information source.
People start to trust your expertise and see you as a go-to information source.
A good example of this is the Creaitz newsletter, a companion for anyone seeking to grow a thriving digital career.
Through our newsletter, we share growth tips from ecosystem leaders, community stories, and earning opportunities.
Over time, we’ve shared educational insights, covering interesting topics like how to build in public, how to know when you’re due for a promotion, how to gain experience after taking courses as a beginner, etc.
You can subscribe here.
2. Curated Newsletters
Writing a newsletter doesn’t always mean you need to spend a whole lot of time researching and researching.
Curated newsletters are the types where you share helpful resources, valuable information, links, tips, and tricks that you’ve garnered from various sources.
You could write a newsletter titled “Top 5 Holiday Ads of All Time” to engage your audience during the festive season.
If you want to create a newsletter that gives you a great return on your investment, without having to start from scratch, then this is the way to go.
It’s also important that you reference where you got your ideas from.
Examples of curated newsletters include the Moz Top 10 newsletter, NTBTS newsletter and the Hustle newsletter by Hubspot.
3. Personal Updates or Journey-Based Newsletters
This type is more personalized.
Here, you can share your experiences, the lessons you’ve learned, personal growth, or other content that is personal to you but also valuable and motivating to your audience.
These types are transparent, motivating, and help to build a real human connection.
For example, Adekunle Gold, one of Nigeria’s top music artists has a newsletter.
Some foreign celebrities also keep and maintain newsletters.
4. Project or Product-Focused Newsletters
If you’re building something, maybe a portfolio, new course or tech product, a project or product-focused newsletter helps to bring your audience along the journey.
You can with them updates on your product, your wins, challenges, etc and this can continue long after you eventually launch.
It’s a perfect fit, if you’re creating your own brand or building in public.
You can check out Posthog’s newsletter tagged Product for Engineers where the Posthog team helps technical people build great products, especially those working at early-stage startups.
5. Community-Based Newsletters
Let’s say you have a large digital community (just like we do at Creaitz), you can use newsletters to highlight your community member wins, opportunities, upcoming events, or shared learning goals.
Community newsletters are not exactly the same as the branded newsletters, they’re more intimate, community-forward, and geared towards creating value.
It’s a space where you can reach your members, share any important information about the community, share information and ideas, and build a closer bond.
An example is the SheFi newsletter where community members are updated with what’s going on at SheFi, new jobs and events.
What is the Purpose of a Newsletter?
Well, the purpose of a newsletter isn’t just to “keep people updated.” That’s surface-level.
Newsletters aren’t just to while away time, they’re written with intention, the type that serves not just your audience, but also yourself in a meaningful way.
This is what it does:
1. Helps you Build and Maintain a Relationship
Newsletters are a wonderful way to stay connected to your audience, in a way that feels personal and showcases that you’re serious about providing them value.
Unlike social media platforms, where your posts compete with a million others and eventually get buried in endless scrolls, newsletters land directly in your audience’s inbox.
2. Helps you Establish Trust and Credibility
People only buy and make connections with those they trust.
Constantly sharing updates, insights, or lessons via a newsletter, positions you as a credible and trustworthy brand.
3. Helps you Deliver Focused Value
Specificity is another unique benefit of newsletters.
Unlike other channels, newsletters focus on writing content for a specific audience.
This means you can focus on sharing more personalized, smarter, and audience-focused insights, allowing you to speak to the specific needs of your audience.
4. Help you Drive Action (Without Being Pushy)
With newsletters you have the opportunity to create content in styles and formats that are convincing enough to drive sales.
You can direct and redirect them to resource pages, product pages, explore your portfolio and many more.
Unlike social media ads, with a newsletter, you can explain, nurture, and even invite people to act just as needed.
5. Help you Own Your Audience
With a newsletter, you have the opportunity to own your audience.
Social media platforms can change, and more importantly, social media algorithm changes too.
With a newsletter, you’re building and nurturing a community you own.
How to Create an Effective Newsletter (A Step-by-Step Guide)
It’s one thing to write a newsletter, it’s another thing to make it effective and achieve the desired results.
That’s the point where many digital skills enthusiasts struggle.
Chances are, you’ve also read some newsletters that bored you so much that you regretted reading them.
We’re in this section so that your newsletter won’t be like such.
This is how to write a newsletter that actually gets opened and acted upon:
1. Know Who You’re Talking To (and Why)
Before you start to write anything, first ask yourself:
- Who am I writing this for?
- What do I want them to feel?
- What do I want them to learn?
A good newsletter starts with clarity.
Your goal is to solve a problem or give answers to a specific need.
When you have a clear intention, you will have clearer writing.
2. Craft a Subject Line That Makes People Want to Click
Your subject line determines whether or not people will read your newsletter.
No matter how valuable the content in your newsletter is, if the heading and first line aren’t catchy enough, no one will read it.
Avoid needless clickbait, but make sure it’s intriguing.
Employ the use of curiosity, benefit, or urgency.
For instance, for our newsletters at Creaitz, we use headings like:
- “How to Land Clients- FAST!”
- “After Taking Courses, How do I Gain Experience?”
- “How to Know When You’re Due For a Promotion”
- “How to Find Content Inspiration For Building in Public (+ Templates)”
These types of headings address the common problems and issues people face and need answers to.
It’s going to be almost impossible not to open this kind of content, because it’s direct, hooky and personalized.
However, you can experiment to see what works with your audience
Many email marketing tools allow A/B testing to see which subject lines perform best.
3. Make Your Intro Worth Their Time
Besides the subject, the first few lines should be intriguing enough to pull people in to read the content.
Just as we do for our blogs at Creaitz, you can start with a very relatable question, a bold and intriguing statement, or a short story. For example:
“I used to send newsletters that got zero replies. Then
I changed one thing…”
You’re not writing to robots, you’re writing to humans, so make it real, honest, understandable, and valuable.
4. Focus on ONE Main Message per Newsletter
Specificity and the ability to narrow down your message to a particular audience are some of the benefits that come with newsletters.
If you try to say everything to everyone, eventually you’ll be speaking to no one.
Choose one idea/problem per mail, it could be a personal story, a detailed guide, or an announcement.
This enables your audience to easily understand your message without feeling overwhelmed.
5. Use a Clear, Simple Structure
You don’t need flashy designs; format your newsletters so that they can be easy to read on both desktop and mobile.
A good flow should go like this:
- A hook/intro
- Main content or message
- Personal note or insight
- Call-to-action (CTA)
Use bullet points and emojis where and when necessary, make use of subheadings, and bolding as well.
6. Always Include a Call-to-Action
You shouldn’t write just for the sake of it, you should have a goal of doing so.
What do you want your readers to do?
Is it to reply? share? Click a link or read your latest blog post?
Add a CTA that convinces them to do this.
And your CTA doesn’t need to be too pushy or desperate, it can be subtle and simple:
- “Let me know what you think.”
- “Read the full guide here.”
- “Forward this to a friend who needs it.”
7. Check Your Timing and Consistency
One common mistake beginners make when searching or asking how to write a newsletter is to think they can be non-casual about the timing of their newsletter.
Do not ghost your audience.
Plan and create a very realistic schedule, it could on a weekly basis, it could be monthly, even; it needs to be something that works not just for you, but for your audience as well.
8. Measure, Learn, Improve
Use analytics to check for things like:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Replies and engagement
- Unsubscribes
They show you what’s working and what’s not, what your audience are connecting to, and what they’re not.
This way, you’ll know what to improve upon and then do so accordingly.
In Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, that shows you’re intentional about growing, learning and achieving more with your digital skills.
And that’s great.
But do you know what’s also great? That’s the fact that growth doesn’t happen alone.
It happens in environments where you can ask the seemingly silly questions, try things out, get the support you need, and a place where you feel like you actually belong.
And that’s exactly what the Creaitz community is all about: we’re a family of learners, builders, and doers like yourself.
There’s no perfect moment; now’s the time to join us, grow and learn, and build your future with a community that supports and builds with you every step of the way.
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