Let’s face it, writing a newsletter can be exciting at first, but it's easy for those exciting ideas to quickly turn stale. Not to mention, you’re having to keep up with the 60% of small business owners using email marketing.
Don’t fret, because what you need is some fresh, doable ideas to revive your small businesses newsletters! We've gathered some of our favourites with unique takes that you can use in your own newsletters
💡 Keep in mind for your small business newsletters:- Be as clear and concise as possible with your newsletter message. Ask yourself: what is the purpose of my newsletter?
- Know your overall audience. Before creating your fabulous new newsletters, it's important to know what your audience expects from your newsletters
7 Small business newsletter ideas
- Themed Newsletters: Original Duckhead
- Bonus Content: Good Pair Days
- Behind the Scenes: Mockberg AB
- Creative Photography: Jayson Home and Garden
- Milestones: Dan Pearce Pottery
- Puns/ Humor: Voited
- Holiday Newsletters: Nothing Bundt Cake, Urban Stems
So, without further ado, here's our roundup of small business newsletter examples you can actually execute!
1. Themed Newsletters: Original Duckhead
Have something exciting you really want to share but not sure how? Promoting a themed collection is a great excuse to get those pieces out there to your customers. While this is similar to a holiday newsletter, with this idea, you’re almost creating your own holiday!
Original Duckhead recently sent out a newsletter about their "The New Yorker" collection. With vibrant colours and uniform theme, their newsletter does a great job at grabbing the recipients attention.
How to build a themed newsletter
Here are some of our ideas to how you could use a theme for your next small business newsletter:
Find items you want to pair together: A day at the picnic photoshoot: floral plates, outdoorsy linen, illustrations of nature nestled in a picnic basket, embroidery pieces with fruit etc.
Find a Colour scheme and fonts that would best fit with your products and brand: for a picnic you can use floral colours and earth tones
📚Bookmark for later: 6 Tips for writing captivating newsletters
2. Bonus Content: Good Pair Days
For those planning monthly newsletters, a great way to spice up your monthly updates is to add bonus content!
Good Pair Days, a wine subscription service, does a great job keeping their newsletters fresh and engaging. They have “Wine Rockstars”, a small list of their top members' names and “Post of the Week”, which reveals their favourite Instagram post that they were tagged in! As a reader, I know I’d want to keep scrolling if I knew there was a chance my post or name was on the newsletter.
Ideas for bonus content
- Recipe of the week
- Best glassware for your drink of choice
- Quizzes related to your protect,
- for example: "Based on your style find your perfect metal to elevate your jewellery collection"
📚Bookmark for later: 8 Email marketing tips for small businesses
3. Behind the Scenes: Mockberg AB
Quick!
You just got a shipment (or you're on the other side of things) and you've started the 3rd step of making your product.
Now would be a really great time to whip out your phone or camera of choice. While you've successfully mastered running your business, your customers don’t know the story behind the products they cherish. By pulling back the curtain your readers can personally connect with their favourite products or store . Your behind-the-scenes photos don’t have to be perfect, just human.
Ideas for behind the scenes
- Behind the scenes of the curation process: What are you looking for in your products?
- Behind the scenes of a photo shoot
- Behind the scenes pet edition
📚Bookmark for later: How to develop a content marketing plan
4. Creative Photography: Jayson Home and Garden
The great thing about this next example is all you need is a good phone or camera! Inspired by the newsletter from Jayson Home and Garden, here's one way to experiment with your photography.
Ideas for your creative photography journey
You can get really creative with it! Grab a jacket, dress, your Nan’s favourite table-cloth and play around with your product photography.
Photos from Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority
Tips for your photography set up
- If you have a tripod then great! If not, don’t worry. If you’re taking the photo standing up, this effect works best when the phone is parallel to the floor.
- Good lighting: get near a window or if you have it, play with a little soft lighting with lighting equipment, or lamps.
5. Milestones: Dan Pearce Pottery
It’s been five years in the making and you’ve finally hit that milestone you’ve been working towards-- so share it!
Sharing Milestones is a great way to help your reader feel welcome into the community. Similar to the behind the scenes tip, milestone emails show your customers where you came from, and how you’ve grown with their help.
Dan Pearce Pottery, a potter and online creator, is a good example of how successful you can be when you share behind-the-scenes content, and how you can share your successes with those that made it happen.
📚Bookmark for later: Capitalising on key events as a small business
6. Puns/ Humor: Voited
Currently, I have too many unread emails in my inbox to count.
Luckily, your email account does it for you. I’m sadly sitting at 8,170 unread emails… Let’s move on.
Sorting through your inbox is hard. Standing out in someone else's? Even harder.
It’s easy for your newsletter to get lost in the shuffle of your target audiences inbox. A little humour, or a spectacular pun, might be all it takes to grab your reader’s attention. According to neurohumorist, author and leading brain-based strategic humorist, Karyn Buxman, “ When we find something funny, our level of alertness goes up and we retain information better. This, in turn, improves brand recognition and sales”.
Here’s a great example from Voited, an outdoor apparel brand with a fabulous sense of humor.
How to use humour in your newsletter
- Know your audience; when done right, humour can be a powerful tool, but there's a fine line between funny and cringey.
- Think of products that relates to your business and see if any puns or jokes come organically to you
- If you’re stumped, searching puns for your type of business: beauty, tableware, home, fashion & jewellery etc.. can help generate ideas for funny titles or puns. There are hundreds of websites with the format “100 pun ideas for —” that you can draw from for examples.
- Example: bicycle brand could use the pun, “Gearing up for our wheely great sale!”
- Example: bicycle brand could use the pun, “Gearing up for our wheely great sale!”
7. Holiday: Nothing Bundt Cake, Urban Stems
According to a Forbes article “69% of consumers say they pay more attention to marketing e-mails during the holidays”! Let’s take advantage of this opportunity and revive your holiday newsletters with some inspiration from Nothing Bundt Cakes, complete with eye-catching GIFs.
For your holiday newsletter you can also change up your colour scheme and showcase products that match that specific holiday. For example, a normal Nothing Bundt Cake newsletter usually has a cooler blue colour scheme. You can see the differences in the two newsletters below.
📚Bookmark for later: A guide to colour theory & branding for your business
Just by changing the colour scheme and specializing their valentines day products, Nothing Bundt Cakes previews most of their speciality items with the video, making it easier for the viewer to see everything they have to offer.
Your GIF guide
- While it looks like Nothing Bundt Cakes created their animated newsletter with Photoshop, an easier route would be looking at websites like Giphy.
- If you're a Canva lover, the 'scrapbook' effect on Canva is another great way to create a similar dynamic effect.
Newsletter takeaways
When making this list of new ways to spice up your small business newsletter we’ve put our heads together to find useful examples that can inspire your own newsletters. Making this was a fun challenge to scavenge our inboxes for these little bits of gold. Who knows, maybe there are more ideas to discover them in your own e-mail inbox.
FAQS
1. What should be included in a business newsletter?
The name of your brand at the top of the page, usually much smaller than the title of your newsletter. Your title to your newsletter and next to the title an image that pops or entices the reader to keep reading. A newsletter should include links to your website or store. Lastly, a business newsletter should have a clear message and purpose.
2. What should the newsletter be about?
To create a newsletter it's important to have a purpose for writing your newsletter. Some examples include: showing products, customer success stories, upcoming holidays, hiring, upcoming products, policy changes...etc. You can really share about anything you deem important in your business through newsletters.
3. What is a good opening sentence for newsletter?
You can greet your reader such as, " Dear [name]", to create a personal connection with your audience. You could also jump into the newsletter with a question that draws the readers in, "Are you looking for the perfect gift for your loved one?". You could start the newsletter with a pun or joke as mentioned earlier in this blog. If you're struggling to come up with ideas for your first sentence, start writing the main part of your newsletter and then return to the beginning to see if anything comes to you.
Related articles:
- 8 Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
- 11 Ongoing Checks & Changes to Make to Your CREOATE Store
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