A newsletter is one of the best things a small business can have. Not because everyone reads every issue, but because the people on your list have already said they want to hear from you. That is rare. Social media algorithms decide who sees your posts. Your newsletter lands directly in someone’s inbox because they chose it.
The trouble is that most business newsletters are not very good. They are either too long, too infrequent, or full of things the reader does not care about. Here is what the research says about doing it well.
Pick a frequency and stick to it
The single biggest reason people unsubscribe from newsletters is that they arrive too often. But the research is more nuanced than that. HubSpot found that around 51% of unsubscribes are frequency-related, but the other top reasons are about content — irrelevance, unmet expectations, nothing useful to act on.
What that tells you is that frequency is not really the problem. Irrelevance is the problem. A weekly newsletter people actually find useful tends to do fine. A monthly one full of nothing still gets ignored.
The more important thing is consistency. People build habits around newsletters they enjoy. Turning up regularly matters more than turning up perfectly. Whatever you decide — weekly, fortnightly, monthly — tell your subscribers upfront, and then do it.
Monthly is the most sustainable starting point for most small businesses. Weekly is achievable if you have enough material and a system for producing it. Daily is almost certainly too much unless your business genuinely has something new to say every day.
One topic. One link. One ask.
This is the one rule the research is most consistent about. Newsletters that try to do too many things at once end up doing none of them well. Nielsen Norman Group found that newsletters with a clear focus and a single call to action consistently outperformed those packed with sections, roundups, offers, and links.
One topic your reader actually cares about. One link if you need one. One clear thing you want them to do — book a call, reply, read the full post, whatever is most relevant.
If you find yourself adding a “what else is happening” section, ask whether it genuinely serves the reader or whether it is just filling space. Usually it is the second thing.
Most people scan, not read
Nielsen Norman Group found that only around one in five newsletters are read in full. The rest are scanned, skimmed, or deleted. That is not a criticism of your subscribers. Inboxes are busy. People make fast decisions about what deserves their attention.
So write for scanning. Short paragraphs. Clear headings. The most useful thing near the top, not buried at the end. If someone reads only the first three lines and the subject line, do those three lines still make sense on their own?
The subject line matters more than you think
Your subject line is the whole pitch. It is the thing that decides whether the email gets opened at all. Nielsen Norman Group’s research on subject lines is clear: tell people what is actually in the email. Do not be vague or clever. Do not make them open it to find out if it is relevant.
Keep it under 40 characters if you can. Many email apps cut it off before that. Put the most important word first.
“June newsletter” is a bad subject line. It tells the reader nothing. “Why your website is slow on mobile” tells them exactly what is inside and whether it is worth their time. Some people who were never going to open it will skip it. That is fine. The people who do open it are actually interested.
Repurpose what you have already written
You do not need to write something brand new for every newsletter. If you publish a blog post, your newsletter is a natural place to share it. A blog post gets read once by whoever happens to find it. A newsletter puts it in front of people who have already asked to hear from you.
The format should feel different though. Write a short personal introduction — why you wrote it, what prompted it, what you want the reader to take from it — and link through to the full post. A newsletter that just pastes in your latest blog post is not really a newsletter. A newsletter that says “I wrote this because a client asked me about it last week, and I think you might find it useful” is.
Keep the design simple
Plain text, or close to it, is often better than a heavily designed template. Nielsen Norman Group’s research found that multi-column newsletter layouts often feel cluttered, particularly on a phone. Single-column designs are easier to read and look less like marketing.
A plain-text newsletter looks like an email from a person, because that is what it is. For a small business, that is a strength, not a limitation.
I have been sending a weekly newsletter for a while now. It was a bullet-pointed summary of what had been happening — new posts, project updates, that kind of thing. Useful enough, but not exactly something people were rushing to open.
I am changing it. From now on the weekly edition will be a proper blog summary — one post, some context about why I wrote it, one thing to do if it is useful to you. The bullet-pointed monthly update will stay, but as a separate thing, once a month, for anyone who wants the broader picture.
If you want to be on the list, sign up below. I will try to make it worth your time.
