When the term “newsletter” was first coined in 1903, most newsletters were physical pamphlets. Today, the word typically means email newsletter.
Unlike traditional marketing emails, which often focus on short-term goals (think automations triggered by customer actions, like an abandoned cart), you can use newsletters to spread information, share a unique point of view, and build relationships.
Discover the benefits of newsletters, see standout newsletter examples, and learn how to engage your audience with newsletters
Benefits of newsletters for ecommerce businesses
A newsletter is an excellent tool for building an online community around your brand. Newsletters let you speak organically with your audience since you’re not presenting sales pitches for individual products.
Newsletter-specific platforms like Substack even allow readers to leave comments, letting subscribers engage with each other and with your brand. (However, you can’t advertise or sell directly within Substack newsletters, and analytics are limited.)
A newsletter can help with the following:
Showcase your brand values
Newsletter content such as partnership announcements, behind-the-scenes videos, and updates on community initiatives can demonstrate your brand values and strengthen customer relationships. You can also share pieces of thought leadership or interviews with employees.
Suppose you run a sustainable ecommerce clothing company. Your monthly newsletter could take readers behind the scenes of your carbon-neutral supply chain, offer tips for reducing clothing waste, or include photos from your team’s park cleanup day.
Build and maintain customer relationships
“You put a lot of effort into getting people to your website,” says Desirae Odjick, product marketing lead at Shopify. “If 100 people show up on your site, and two to five of them buy something, that’s a really good conversion rate. But then 95 or more are leaving without doing anything.”
Newsletter subscribers are a rich source of potential customers. “If you can get three to five of those people who weren’t ready to buy to give you their email address, those are three to five more people you’re now going to be able to reach.”
Newsletters also keep your business top of mind for existing customers, helping you nurture them into repeat buyers.
Humanize your brand
Sharing stories about your company and the people behind it encourages emotional connections with your brand.
Company founders should consider sending some newsletters in their own voice, as Cap Beauty Founder Kerrilynn Palmer does in her first-person feature Kerrilynn’s Picks.
You can also bring in team members, outside experts, and collaborators to share their points of view, since bylines add credibility.
Many successful newsletters include previews of content in the newsletter itself, then provide “read more” links that direct subscribers to the company’s blog or ecommerce website. Depending on your audience’s needs, you could communicate your company ethos through long-form pieces, photo essays, or videos.
Types of newsletters and examples
The best type of newsletter for your business will depend on your company’s goals and your audience’s needs. Here are a few types to consider:
Interest-specific
If your small business caters to a niche community—crafters, or foodies, for instance—your subscribers’ interest in your subject matter likely extends beyond their interest in your brand.
Cater to their interests by publishing newsletters with craft industry news, DIY stories, or exclusive recipes.
Dribbble is a platform for connecting businesses with freelance designers. Its branding-specific newsletter goes out to marketing and advertising professionals who can use it to read excerpts from Dribble’s top blog articles for best practices and innovating tactics, as well as industry updates from around the web.
Lifestyle
Attention to aesthetics can turn your newsletter into a premium artistic product that showcases your visual brand identity. Lifestyle newsletters feature strong photography, illustrations, or graphic design, so you’ll need a trusted designer on staff or on contract to produce this type of newsletter.
Wonder Valley’s Desert Dispatch is a visually striking lifestyle newsletter. The California-based olive oil company includes weather forecasts and events roundup for the Joshua Tree area, a nod to analog newsletters of the past. Newsletter designs reinforce the brand’s retro, desert-inspired aesthetic and emphasize its connection to a beloved place.
Product roundups
Product roundups (like wish lists, gift guides, or favorite product lists) give subscribers a glimpse into aspirational lives. Employee-picked roundups are particularly effective for taste-defining brands—think of “What our editors are wearing” articles from magazines like Vogue—but influencers and brand representatives can also contribute to roundups.
Here’s an example of a gift guide product roundup from CAP Beauty, which features a wide range of product selections from four creatives. Note that the brand limits the number of its own products in its roundup: You’ll lose authenticity if you include too many.
You can also extend your curated roundups beyond consumer goods. Take a look at this example from beauty brand Saie, which includes food, book, television, and activity recommendations from employees. Saie posts its “Trending at HQ” newsletters on its Substack, where the company publishes content ranging from product features to interviews.
Guides
Newsletter guides are a great place to share expertise and get your audience to think about your brand in an extended, but connected, context. For example, this restaurant guide from the tableware company Gohar World gives readers a breakdown of the best restaurants in Barcelona, Spain.
Gohar World isn’t a travel company, but making restaurant recommendations makes perfect sense for a tableware brand, especially since founder Laila Gohar often shares her travels on her personal Instagram.
Guides can be a great way to incentivize potential customers to sign up for your emails, since they’ll know helpful, actionable content is on the way.
Blog roundups
You can compile articles from your company’s blog into newsletters that function as mini email-based magazines. To drive traffic to your site, you’ll want to preview blog posts instead of publishing them in full in your email. This directs curious subscribers to navigate to your blog to get the full story.
Blog roundups allow you to recycle content, which can save you time as you’re drafting newsletters. Keep your newsletter in mind as you create your blog content, and vice versa. For example, you might draft blog posts with high-impact images you know will pique readers’ interest in an email. As you craft your newsletter, you might select blog posts that have proved particularly popular.
This newsletter from olive oil company Graza consists mainly of images with links to the brand’s blog. Creating a newsletter like this involves curating existing content that pairs well together, like this soup recipe and “what I eat in a day” diary from comedian John Higgins. Combining something practical (a recipe) with funny food content aligns with Graza’s playful branding.
Creative agency and travel publication Italy Segreta releases its online magazine as themed newsletter “issues.” An intro, visuals, and short blurbs entice readers to click through to the full article.
Themed
Themed newsletters work best for companies with dedicated followings, since you’ll need to have readers willing to listen to what you have to say—even if it’s not immediately relevant to them. If you’re a founder with a public presence, you can also style these types of newsletters as “Notes from the founder.”
Take this example from the home goods brand Dusen Dusen. The company dedicated this newsletter to soup, including three recipes alongside a few product promotions for soup-adjacent items like bowls (and a laundry hamper for soup-stained garments).
This newsletter from craft shop Brooklyn General Store is dedicated to squirrels, providing a fact-heavy introductory text followed by an assortment of squirrel-related knitting patterns and products. It works because the shop’s owners actually love squirrels: “We have a squad of hand-knit squirrels that always catch visitors’ attention,” they write.
For Brooklyn General Store, a themed newsletter helps bring the charm of the store’s physical location to life for ecommerce shoppers.
How to create a successful newsletter
- Choose the right platform
- Choose a design
- Select a frequency
- Market your newsletter
- Create relevant, quality content
- Craft a compelling subject line and preheader
- Incorporate calls to action
- Consider your readers display
To create an email newsletter that stands out, use these steps as your guide:
1. Choose the right platform
Many platforms can help you create and send newsletters. Shopify Email is a great option for ecommerce businesses, since it allows you to easily send your newsletter to specific customer segments.
For example, a business selling both bottled shampoo and DIY shampoo-making kits likely has two distinct audiences, each interested in different content. Customers who have purchased the DIY kits would probably enjoy a newsletter featuring a step-by-step walkthrough of the shampoo-making process. Those who bought premade shampoo might not.
However, you can also publish your newsletter on a site like Substack, which is designed to host high-quality editorial content instead of overt marketing material. More and more brands are publishing newsletters on Substack, social media consultant Rachel Karten explains in her blog Link in Bio.
Readers will need to manually subscribe to your newsletter on Substack’s site, and your content will appear in their inboxes from a Substack email address (rather than from the address that sends your other marketing materials).
This separation can help readers view your newsletter as a valuable, desirable product rather than a marketing tool. You can even forego branding entirely and publish a founder-led newsletter like Charlotte Palermino, the founder of skin care brand Dieux.
Just note that you’ll give up personalization and automation, so Substack might not help you reach short-term sales goals. “Companies can make millions of dollars per month thanks to personalized email flows. A Substack newsletter will never compete with that. That’s because Substack is not an email marketing tool, it’s a community tool,” writes Rachel.
The platform features a comment section, which allows readers to directly engage with each other and with your brand. You’ll probably want to employ a community manager or content manager to ensure comments are respectful.
2. Choose a design
To maintain branding consistency across channels, your newsletter design should reflect your brand identity. Consider your brand assets (visual elements like typography, logo, and color palette) and incorporate them into your newsletter design.
Don’t worry if you’re not a web design pro. Many platforms, including Shopify Email, have newsletter templates you can easily customize to fit your brand identity.
3. Select a frequency
As you consider how often to send your email newsletters, strike the balance between staying fresh in your subscribers’ minds and not overwhelming them with content. This is especially important if you’re also sending other email campaigns (like personalized personalized product recommendations or abandoned cart reminders) as part of your digital marketing strategy.
To maximize engagement, aim to send around one newsletter per week. Weekly newsletters have the highest open rates (at 48.31%) and click-through rates (at 5.71%), according to 2023 data from email marketing software company GetResponse.
Consistency is key, so choose a cadence that feels manageable. Readers will come to expect your newsletter in their inbox on a certain day; Making good on this unspoken promise can help you build and maintain trust with your subscribers.
4. Market your newsletter
Make sure your potential customers know about your newsletter, and make it easy for them to sign up.
“Create an email sign-up landing page and link to it regularly,” says Desirae Odjick, who works on both Shopify Email and Shopify Forms, which you can use to capture leads and build your email list.
Your social media bios are a great place to link out to your newsletter sign-up form. “That is one of the easiest, lowest-investment ways for someone to take the next step from the other places that they’re finding out about you,” Desirae says.
Remember to always incentivize customers to sign up for your emails—whether that’s through a welcome discount or exclusive perks like early access to product drops or premium content.
5. Create relevant, quality content
To differentiate your newsletters from other marketing emails, include engaging content in addition to product promotions. This content should be interesting and valuable to readers, even if they haven’t purchased one of your products before. (For example, a tips list or a reported article can provide subscribers with clear value.)
Ensure that it’s easy for readers to consume: Make your email copy clear and concise, and break it up with images. You can include everything from longform narrative stories about the origins of your brand to video interviews with employees to tutorials on how to use your product.
If you’re looking for more ideas, Desirae recommends looking through the Shopify Email templates. “All the templates are built for ecommerce businesses, so they’re all emails that businesses like yours have sent—they might spark some ideas.”
6. Craft a compelling subject line and preheader
Write a subject line that’s short, catchy, and true to your brand voice. To maximize open rates, you’ll want to keep it below 70 characters, according to the 2024 report from GetResponse.
You might be tempted to use all-caps or urgent phrases like “act now” to grab readers’ attention, but this can backfire, triggering spam filters and hurting your email deliverability. Stick to subject lines that are both engaging and accurate.
Make sure to also include a preheader, the short snippet of text that appears next to the subject line in a subscriber’s inbox. Marketing emails with preheaders have a 6% higher open rate than those without.
7. Incorporate calls to action
Include a clear call to action (CTA) that directs your readers toward next steps. This CTA will differ depending on the goal and content of your newsletter.
For example, let’s say you run a sustainable sock brand and you’re sending a newsletter explaining the environmentally friendly sourcing practices behind your new line of cotton socks. You’re aiming to encourage sales of your new cotton sock line while also cultivating brand trust.
In this scenario, you might include two CTAs: one to direct readers to a webpage where they can learn more about your brand’s partnerships with ethical growers and manufacturers and another to direct readers to a webpage where they can purchase your new cotton socks.
8. Make it mobile-friendly
You might write your newsletters on your work computer, but your readers will probably open them on their phones. Mobile devices account for more than half of all web traffic, and while there are no longer stats on how many emails are opened on mobile devices (due to changes in image caching technology), mobile opens accounted for 41.6% of all emails opened in 2021.
Make sure your newsletter looks good on different devices and with different display options, like dark mode, which has become increasingly popular for its ability to reduce eyestrain.
To ensure mobile optimization, you’ll want to use a responsive email template that adapts to multiple screen sizes. You might also consider breaking up text with images and using smaller images to ensure smartphone viewers can see them in their entirety. Before sending your newsletter, preview how it will look on mobile versus desktop.
Newsletter examples FAQ
What should you put in your first newsletter?
Your first newsletter should include a welcome or thank you note. You might also include information on what your new subscribers can expect, such as information on the nature of the content you’ll send and your newsletter’s frequency. If you’ve promised a sign-up incentive like a discount, provide information on how customers can use it.
What are 6 elements of an effective newsletter?
Six elements that can help your newsletter stand out are:
1. A defined audience
2. A clear subject line
3. An intriguing preheader (the text that appears after a subject line)
4. A simple and beautiful newsletter design
5. Informative content
6. A call to action
What are common mistakes to avoid when writing a newsletter?
Common mistakes to avoid when writing a newsletter include:
- Failing to define a clear audience
- Poor email design
- Sending newsletters too frequently or too infrequently
- Not writing compelling subject lines
- Including content that doesn’t add value for the reader
- No call to action (CTA)
