Why Your Community Absolutely Needs an Email Newsletter

With social media and other online channels, reaching customers has never been easier for businesses. With a few simple clicks, you can share content with your customers, exchange messages with your clients, and find out more about your target audience.

While social media is great for this and has made an undeniably positive impact on businesses, there is one tool that is sometimes overlooked yet remains integral to building a community.

Emails.

Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to promote your brand and drive engagement. In today’s digital age, email newsletters are vital for any business or online community that wants to keep users engaged, drive traffic, and build customer loyalty.

Let’s explore the many benefits of email newsletters and why your online community needs one.

Why Do You Need an Email Newsletter?

Email newsletters allow you to contact your subscribers and customers regularly. They provide an opportunity to communicate new and essential information related to your business and help keep your brand top-of-mind. With so many distractions, it’s easy for users to forget about your brand if they’re not reminded of it regularly.

A consistent email newsletter helps you as a content creator or business owner because it’s a commitment to creating content regularly.

BenGingi, a co-creator of YASSSletter, a gastronomic newsletter, explains that he thinks commitment is one of the keys to success for a creator, and the newsletter format demands commitment.

“[Whether] you have one subscriber or ten million subscribers, you are committed to it. I have to show up every Thursday with the newsletter, even though it’s not the best time for the last couple of weeks for me to do it. People are waiting to get it every week for the recipes they will make with their family that weekend. So, we are very committed.”

Email newsletters can be essential to a broader marketing strategy for small businesses and startups. For larger businesses and organizations, they can help to reinforce the brand mission and values.

Why Are Community Newsletters Essential?

Community newsletters are essential for keeping customers engaged and building a loyal base of followers. By sharing useful, engaging, and entertaining content with your subscribers regularly, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and encourage repeat visits to your website or social channels.

Community newsletters also provide a way to keep subscribers up-to-date with the latest happenings in your business or organization. It helps foster engagement and community conversation, inspiring followers to become brand advocates for your online community.

Mady Maio, the founder of the Camber App, before starting LA Happenings by Camber, said one of her primary challenges was finding the right newsletter platform to foster the Camber app community. Unlike most typical newsletters, where the content is the product, Maio wanted to create a newsletter to drive growth to her app and community.

“beehiiv, to me, feels a lot more accessible to other communities rather than just writers or journalists. I feel like beehiiv can be used for a brand. I’ve seen it being used across multiple companies and brands. So, I think there’s a lot more accessibility regarding that. beehiiv, to me, [has more of a] community aspect, this more niched, specific use case. And that’s why it worked so well for the Los Angeles newsletter specifically…” stated Maio during a case study interview.

What Are the Benefits of an Online Newsletter?

Email newsletters benefit small businesses, large companies, and even digital creators.

1. Opt-In: One of the main benefits of email newsletters is that users have opted-in to receive your updates. Since subscribers are already interested in your brand, the email newsletters you send them are more likely to be read and acted upon.

2. Segmentation: You can segment your subscriber base to send specific newsletters to different groups of people based on their interests, demographics, and more. This maximizes the relevance of your content and improves engagement.

3. Cost Effective: Email newsletters are cost-effective, with a low overhead cost and high return on investment.

4. Revenue Generation: You can also generate revenue with an email newsletter. Paid newsletters are a great way to engage your audience and create a recurring revenue stream. You have a win-win situation: readers get great ad-free content, and you get consistent recurring revenue.

5. Promotional Opportunities: You can offer special deals and promotions to your subscribers. Emails offering special discounts and promotions codes make great content for emails, and they typically have an excellent open rate and click-through rate. They can potentially result in more sales for your company.

What Are the Benefits of a Newsletter in an Organization?

Internal newsletters are great for keeping employees informed of company developments, purpose, and vision. They can also act as a tool for promoting organizational transparency and accountability.

Employee onboarding and training is a significant benefit of an internal newsletter, keeping the staff updated on current policies, upcoming product launches, and updates from senior management.

A newsletter can even be used to celebrate employee birthdays, achievements, and milestones and recognize top performers within the company hierarchy. It fosters connectivity, increases employee motivation, and boosts morale to create an active, thriving, and inclusive company culture.

Are Email Newsletters Still Effective?

The short answer—yes!

Despite some predictions of the death of email, email newsletters remain one of the most reliable and effective marketing strategies available. Recent studies suggest that email campaigns outperform social media, Google Ads, and other advertising and broadcasting channels. Because an email newsletter is an opt-in product, subscribers are genuinely interested in the brand and keep an excellent open rate.

Also, personalized content and attractive templates nudge users to click, read, and stay with your brand.

Email newsletters are essential to any online community's marketing strategy and can benefit organizations significantly. They allow you to establish an authentic connection with subscribers, keep them engaged, and reinforce your brand mission.

Online communities can build a loyal following and establish authority in their niche by providing subscribers with valuable, entertaining, and educational content. With the proper tooling and guidance, you can launch a winning online newsletter that connects with subscribers and inspires community conversation.

If you’re looking for a platform to build and grow your newsletter with, beehiiv is an all-in-one platform that can help you maximize your reach. So, go ahead and launch that newsletter and reap the benefits that email marketing has to offer!