32 types of newsletters

Email newsletters are hardly the only way to communicate with your audience, community, supporters or customers. There's SMS, WhatsApp, social networks, podcasts, websites...the list goes on.

But email (and hence email newsletters) are flexible, resilient and largely immune from the vagaries of platform algorithms.

Email is also simple and universal. This makes it–and email newsletters–both pervasive and reliable in a world flooded in frustrating, broken and hard to use tech.

Simplicity and universality also overcomplicate email newsletters. They make it easy to turn a good and useful newsletter into something harder, more complicated, less handy...and maybe ignored.

Here are a few (or 32, to be exact) types of newsletters. You might recognize the good and the bad in here. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, exact or exclusive. Many newsletters fall into two, three or several of these categories.

Some newsletters deliver right there in your inbox. They don't try to manipulate you into clicking, buying, driving your time and attention elsewhere.

1. The newsletter that provides great stuff right there in the newsletter. You don't have to go clicking links or wading through ads.
2. The newsletter that goes deep into an obscure subject.
3. The newsletter that provides updates on a topic that people aren’t going to get somewhere else.
4. The newsletter that always tells a great story.
5. The newsletter with something you won’t read anywhere else.
6. The newsletter that you’re low key excited to get because it’s interesting, fun to read and feels like you’re talking with the writer.
7. The newsletter that has a whole bunch of links to stories and pictures and articles you aren’t going to get anywhere else.
8. The newsletter that always has at least one big takeaway you can use this week.
9. The newsletter that makes you laugh.
10. The newsletter that gives you hope, gives you an idea, gives you a reason to believe it’s all going to be okay.
11. The newsletter with strong vibes and a point of view.

Some newsletters are helpful, they teach you, offer you something unique.

12. The newsletter that provides information you can’t get somewhere else. Or maybe you can but not as easily. Or delivered so clearly.
13. The newsletter that teaches you how to do something.
14. The newsletter that is part 4 of an ongoing training or course.
15. The newsletter that goes to listeners of a podcast and offers extra material you won’t get in the podcast.
16. The newsletter with helpful charts and graphs.
17. The newsletter written by a famous (or at least semi-well known) celebrity, journalist or expert in the field.
18. The newsletter that helps you save money on groceries, cars, home improvements, energy costs, or concert tickets.
19. The newsletter with an oddly good and reliable set of new job posts.
20. The newsletter that always has one solid recommendation for a tool or product you can use. Sometimes you wonder if it’s actually an ad but it never really seems like one.

There's another category of newsletters–the less helpful, less read, more aggravating.

21. The newsletter that you don’t remember subscribing to (or maybe didn't...especially if it's coming from a political candidate).
22. The newsletter from that one company that sells your mom’s favorite hand cream you bought her for her birthday seven years ago.
23. The newsletter that seems to be 78% ads. Give or take.
24. The newsletter that goes on and on and on and on and on...
25. The newsletter that is just today’s blog post.
26. The newsletter that includes everything.
27. The newsletter with really (really) small fonts.
28. The newsletter written and edited by a committee.
29. The newsletter that comes out every four to six weeks–infrequently enough that you forgot why you subscribed.
30. The newsletter that forces you to click through to the website because they need traffic to make money off of page views.
31. The newsletter that just links to everything the sender posted on their site since the last newsletter.
32. The newsletter that suggests you subscribe to five newsletters you’ve never heard of right after you subscribe to it.

What would you add to this list?

top photo by Julien Photo on Unsplash