Email Marketing and How to Curate an Effective Business Newsletter

Email marketing is the most effective channel available to marketers today.

Emails can help you keep your business the center of attention, build thought leadership around your brand, and generate sales.

However, it also requires content, and creating content can be time-consuming.

So how can marketers like you send out engaging newsletters without spending hours creating content?

The answer is to create a curated newsletter.

In this post, we'll show you what a curated email newsletter is and walk you through the process of setting up a curated newsletter that brings results for your business. However, before we dive into curated newsletters, let's first touch on the basics of newsletters, in general.

What is an email newsletter?

Before a company dives into creating curated newsletters, it needs to have a solid understanding of what an email newsletter is.

An email newsletter is an email communication that is sent to inform your subscribers about various topics, such as:

• Latest news
• Advice
• Product updates / launches
• Important appointments

These emails can cover general topics and user-generated topics that are sent on a predetermined schedule, such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.

What is a curated newsletter?

A curated newsletter aggregates interesting and/or popular content on a specific topic.

Curated newsletters find the best of the best material and then collect it in one place. Often, along with links to external content locations, the newsletter will also offer a brief commentary or summary of the pieces.

Here is an example from Campaign Monitor client SitePoint:

The newsletter curates the best web design and development content from across the web and delivers it daily to subscribers in a simple and convenient format.

Why create a curated newsletter?

There are several reasons why companies will create curated newsletters. For many, it helps their businesses to:

• Stay on top with subscribers

• Build thought leadership around your brand

• Sharing interesting discoveries and resources

  
  

Curated newsletters are an opportunity to offer readers a wide range of material that you have personally selected for them.

Plus, with so much content posted on the web, a curated newsletter has serious value.

How do you curate a good newsletter?

What makes a good newsletter really depends on the brand, industry, and target audience. The reason for this is that everyone wants something a little different which is why they choose specific activities to follow.

Additionally, here are several tips to curate a newsletter that works well.

1. Choose a topic for your newsletter

To create your curated email newsletter, you need to choose your topic. Ask yourself: will your curated newsletter support marketers with email marketing tips & tricks? Or, will your curated content be about web design trends?

2. Don't try to sell

During product launches/updates, you’ll be mentioning a product. But aside from that, remember that the content is about the reader, not what you sell to them.

3. Be short and simple

It must be informative and should also encourage readers to click the link to learn more.

4. Aim for a click-through

Click-through rate (CTR) is the most common metric for measuring engagement within an email campaign. CTR is a metric that measures how many people click through an email in relation to how many emails were delivered.

Essentially, the click rate is a percentage that tells you how many emails successfully achieved one click from a subscriber. This click tells you if your campaign was engaging enough to not only entice an open, but also action from your audience (Source).

5. Simplify deactivation (unsubscribe link)

It is vital to make deactivation easy for those who wish to stop receiving communications.

6. Make sure it's compelling

Compelling writing is one of the most critical parts of starting a curated email newsletter.

How can I start curating an email newsletter for my company?

Starting an email newsletter isn't all that difficult, especially if you've already created a list of email users.

From there, you'll simply have to send opt-in emails to your subscribers to make sure they want to receive your marketing materials, and once that's done you can start sending them according to your predetermined schedule.