• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 6, 2017

Click on almost any Web site these days, and you’ll be invited to subscribe to a newsletter. Now that makes sense from the marketer’s perspective — how else can a company build an email list? But it may not be such a good deal for consumers. Soon, their inboxes are glutted with more content than they can read, much of it marked by turgid copy, bad graphics and other pathologies. Will they even open these products?

They will if the newsletters are done well, and offer both value and community.

Take “My Little Paris,” a French-language franchise with 3 million subscribers. Started by Parisian Fany Péchiodat, it covers the best of Paris, everything from fashion to mobile apps,” according to Forbes.  

“My Little Paris’ newsletters, subscription boxes, beauty products and mobile apps are all designed to feel intimate, warm and personal,” Forbes writes. Next on tap? An English-language newsletter called “La Parisienne.”

Then there are the great e-commerce newsletters, like cosmetic marketer Shu Uemura’s. This one rarely fails to offer discounts and special offers — you get 10% off simply by giving them your email address.   

Are you agitated about politics? (Who isn’t these days?) Those on the left have many new newsletters to inspire them, from “Resistable” (a calendar-style listing of rallies and protests) to “action.now,” a daily news wrap-up that suggests actions, according to an article by “Glamour.” And there are many community-driven newsletters on the right.  

Jess Nelson reports today that newsletters were the most common type of email sent by marketers in 2016.

High-quality email newsletters both educate and entertain readers. They create brand value and generate sales even when there is no direct offer. And they work well when paired with social media and other channels. But it is important to do them well. That means clean copy (no tongue-twisters) and action-oriented subject lines and teasers. The payoff? It’s simple. “According to marketing research company Demand Metric, 80 percent of customers they surveyed appreciated learning about a company through custom content, 57 percent read some form of content marketing at least once per month and 82 percent felt more positive about a company after reading it,” Business2community writes.