Struggling for ideas for your email newsletter?

Victorian scientific illustration of pigeons (multiple varieties) courtesy of the BHL

Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One person gets only a week's value out of a year while another gets a full year's value out of a week.

— Charles Richards (American author and psychologist)

How many genuinely brilliant ideas do you think you need to fill your annual content calendar?

One for every week?

Because if you’re responsible for the communications of a charity, a non-profit, or any purpose-driven business, it can certainly feel that way.

Every time newsletter day rolls around I used to find myself asking:

Right. What the heck are we sending this time?

But I have good news: you don’t need 52 brand-new ideas to have an annual content calendar and an engaging email strategy.

We previously shared some ideas for writing your email newsletter faster, and today we're taking it a step further, with a simple system.

With the right structure and approach, you can build a plan around just five or six good ideas. And as you'll see, the rest will quickly fall into place.

If you’re like me, you might default to thinking of every email as a completely new creation.

But I’m trying to stop thinking like that.

Instead, we want to take a little time in one session to create just a handful of formats — a bank of ideas and structures — you can return to again and again.

If we’re going to get fancy, we could call it our “email newsletter idea toolkit” or something… But you can call it whatever you want.

Armed with each of these, the ideas can start pouring out — you can likely think of multiple ideas and examples in your organisation for each of these core concepts. Before you know it, you’ll have 52 issues.

1. Tell a story

Tell a story that appeals to the emotional side of your audience — it could be about a person, a moment or an experience that brings your work to life.

Tell your audience about something you’ve learned recently in your work that could be relevant to them. Give people a reason to think.

3. Show your impact

You don’t have to do this in every issue. You could dedicate entire email updates to just one number, a milestone, a result or a small win. Show people where their support is going — and go deep on it.

4. Ask for action

We’ve spoken before about the art of asking people to take action with good CTAs. You could go deep in multiple issues about why taking action can be so impactful — for you, your organisation, and for the recipient. Donate, purchase, volunteer, attend, sign up, share, reply. Give people something meaningful to do.

5. Introduce someone

People love to connect with people — not faceless entites. Spend an issue dedicated to a volunteer, a team member, a customer, a supporter, a partner or someone whose life has been touched by your work. It’s easy to underestimate the impact this can have on building lasting, trusted relationships with your audience.

6. Go behind the scenes

What are you working on? What’s changing in your organisation or your industry? What does a normal day at your organisation actually look like? Going behind the scenes can feel uncomfortable — it’s often messy and full of things we are embarassed by. But again this can build so much trust with your audience, and again remind the reader that you and your team are human. More than ever, people want to hear more about how things work on the inside — not just the flashy cover.

And that’s it — you now have six formats you can rotate throughout the year.

Of course, I don’t expect any of these to be unbelievably surprising to you. But what I encourage you to do is to step out of your comfort zone, and go a little deeper on any one of these in a future email.

Overcoming repetition

You might think that this could get repetitive over the course of a year — re-using five or six ideas.

But it doesn’t have to be — it all depends on how you “fill” each of these concepts. For example, the chances are you can think of more than just one person you could introduce to your audience — you may even be struggling to pick who right now! This idea alone could give you ten compelling emails to put together.

The benefit of repetition

It’s also worth bearing in mind the importance and benefit of repetition.

You and your team might have spent the last three weeks talking about the same campaign — in every meeting, in every internal call, and around the lunch table.

But your supporters haven’t!

You might feel like you’ve mentioned your new project a hundred times. Someone who joined your mailing list last month is hearing about it for the first time.

And something that feels completely obvious to the people inside your organisation might be exactly what your audience needs explaining.

Almost always, you’re so much closer and more aware of your content, your work, and your organisation than anyone in your audience is. So don’t be afraid to frequently go back to basics, and repeat yourself.

Ask yourself the right questions

Instead of asking yourself “What can we possibly say that we haven’t said before?”

Try asking questions like:

What’s interesting that’s happening in our work right now?
Is there a lens I can look through that would make a topic interesting to our audience?
What story would I want every single one of our subscribers to know about, even if some have heard it before?

For example, if you’re working on a new project, you could tell the story of someone impacted by it.

It might be obvious, but if you’re working on a new fundraising campaign, you could dive deeper on the impact the money will have — even if that may feel a little repetitive.

If you’ve just put together a new report, don’t feel you have to share the whole thing. You could pull out one surprising insight or statistic — you could even do this on multiple occasions with different elements, to make the one report go so much further.

If you’re celebrating a big milestone, don’t be afraid to highlight it and connect it back to what matters to your audience.

If you come back to this toolkit of just six formats, I promise you will quickly find that you’re not trying to manufacture 52 pieces of content per year from thin air.

Fewer ideas, less pressure, more impact

The returns from email marketing, and specifically from newsletters, rarely come instantly. They grow gradually, and they compound over time.

That’s why we often say: the best email strategy isn’t a perfect one, it’s the one you can actually keep doing with consistency.

So, next time the blank email template stares back at you, don’t panic!

You probably don’t need another idea.

You just need another angle.

Until next time,

James

The illustration in today’s edition is of pigeons. They're the same breed, drawn five times: same beak, same absurd orange eye ring, same white head, same tilted-forward stance like they've all just been asked a difficult question. But they each have a different shield — green, buff, black, chestnut, white. If you were stretching your analogies, you could say it’s one idea of a pigeon, interpreted multiple times, much like today’s whole theme.

The artwork itself is a chromolithograph plate from The Pigeon Book by Alfred Henry Osman (London: George Newnes, 1910), digitised by Cornell University Library and made freely available by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Public domain.