Like most people, I’m careful about handing my email address to anyone. But because they sit in my inbox and can be opened (or ignored) at a time of my choosing, I’ve found newsletters keep me in the know about specific topics — which in my case includes media comings and goings.
– David Carr, The New York Times

In this post, we’ll look at nine awesome newsletters from around the web and draw a lesson from each. While the format of newsletter is limited by the constraints of email technology, the content is not. Let’s get reading!

Smashing Magazine

About: Smashing Magazine, a website dedicated to web/graphic/UI design, sends out a newsletter twice a month, filled with tips, tricks and resources for designers and developers.

Lesson: don’t be afraid of images and longform content. Smashing Magazine’s newsletter is really long, significantly more lengthy than almost any other popular newsletter. And yet, it works, largely because of sharp design and useful content. Is your newsletter too bare? Try adding images.

Sign up for the Smashing Magazine newsletter or view an example.

Remotive

About: Remotive is a hub for remote jobs. Their newsletter includes remote job listings, tips and tricks for getting a remote job, and other useful information.

Lesson: Make money by making others money. Remotive helps both job-seekers and employers. By helping both sides of the employment equation, they’ve positioned themselves as a go-to spot for all things remote.

Sign up for the Remotive newsletter or view an example.

Unsplash

About: The idea behind Unsplash is simple: completely free, high-quality stock images. Their newsletter is equally as simple; every 10 days, they send out 10 images.

Lesson: Be reliably useful. Unsplash isn’t complicated; it’s just a bunch of cool photos. And yet, it’s immensely successful. Sometimes, less is more.

Sign up for the Unsplash newsletter or browse the images.

Startup Digest

About: Startup Digest is a personalized newsletter for all things startup.

Lesson: personalize! Startup Digest is unique in that each newsletter is completely customized for the subscriber. Subscribers can choose from a number of topics that they are interested in, ranging from 3D printing to crowdfunding and everything in between. In MailPoet, try using separate lists to divide your users by topic.

Sign up to the Startup Digest newsletter or view the customized newsletter for London.

Hacker Newsletter

About: Hacker Newsletter is a weekly newsletter of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from Hacker News, one of the most popular websites for startup founders and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Interestingly, the Hacker Newsletter team has no relation to the actual team behind Hacker News; they simply piggybacked their product on top of the already-successful news site. Not a bad business model, indeed!

Lesson: focus on the content. The Hacker Newsletter, just like the actual Hacker News website, is sparse on design. Instead, the focus is completely on the content.

Content is king.
– Bill Gates

Are your newsletters too filled with extraneous content? Try cutting down to the basics. Always remember that your readers have limited time and attention.

Sign up for the Hacker Newsletter or view an example.

Next Draft

About: Next Draft is a newsletter featuring a curated list of the 10 most important news articles of the day.

Lesson: curation beats automation. Dave Pell, the founder and editor of Next Draft, is widely praised for his ability to pick out fascinating articles (and skip boring ones.) Check out this profile of Mr. Pell on TechCrunch.

The idea is I want you to feel like you are just getting an email from me that you could reply back to. It’s always the personal stuff people remark on. We’re all dying for human connection on the web.
– Dave Pell

Sign up for the Next Draft newsletter or view an example.

Do you have a good eye for content? Try acting as curator for your readers. Curation is an effective way to build a solid newsletter, but only if done correctly:

When curating content as part of your content marketing strategy, it’s crucial to add your own commentary — or annotation — to differentiate your content from that of other sources, comply with fair use requirements, and boost the overall SEO value of all your content offerings.
– Pawan Deshpande

Need some help organizing your curation process? Check out this post from the Content Marketing Institute.

The New York Times: What We’re Reading

About: Sent twice a week, the What We’re Reading newsletter includes articles from around the web, hand-selected by New York Times reporters and editors.

Lesson: leverage your expertise. The New York Times naturally has an enormous team of qualified editors, writers, and journalists from around the web.

Do you have deep expertise in a particular topic? (Or know people that do?) Include it in your newsletters.

Sign up for the New York Times’ What We’re Reading newsletter or view an example.

Improbable Research

About: Improbable Research sends out a monthly email that includes research that “makes people LAUGH and then THINK.” Interestingly, their newsletter is written in plain text, without any fancy HTML templates or images, which adds to the academic flavor.

Lesson: make the inaccessible accessible. Improbable Research covers academic research, a complicated topic indeed. But, by highlighting funny, thought-provoking research in a straightforward way, they make a detailed piece of research accessible. If your newsletter covers a technical or complex topic, think about how you can make it easier to understand.

Sign up for the Improbable Research Mini-AIR newsletter or view an example.

MailPoet

About: We hope this doesn’t need an explanation! But, if you’re unfamiliar with our newsletter, it’s a once-monthly email, full of MailPoet news, tips and tricks, plus a curated selection of informative articles from around the web.

Lesson: experiment and embrace change. We’ve modified the MailPoet Newsletter format many times (and will continue to do so.) By being open to change and new experiments, we continue to improve. Is your newsletter getting stale? Try mixing it up with a new format.

Sign up to the MailPoet Newsletter.

That about sums up our overview of nine awesome newsletters from around the web. What are your favorite newsletters? Let us know in the comments!

If you’re like us, you use English to communicate with your newsletter audience, too. In fact, over 3/4 of our customers are from non-native-English-speaking countries! In this post, we’ll cover some tips and tricks for writing email newsletters in flawless English.

Want to read more about the ins-and-outs of the English language? Check out English for Tech Startups, a side project run by a MailPoet team member – the author of this post :)

How to start an email

First things first: you need to introduce yourself! Luckily, writing an introduction is pretty simple in English. For most emails, a simple Hi or Hello works just fine:

Hi subscribers,

Hello subscribers,

If you want to be more formal, using dear is acceptable, too.

Dear subscribers,

However, you should never start an email with the phrase, Dear friend, Dear Sirs, or Dear Madams, as these are often used by spammers and other terrible people.

For the most part, English-speakers tend to identify these sorts of email introductions with the spam inbox. When in doubt, stick with Hello or Dear.

Avoid common mistakes

English is a complex language. So complex, in fact, that even native speakers often make simple mistakes. Three of the more common errors to avoid are:

1. Using there’s with plural objects. For example, this sentence is grammatically incorrect:

On our website, there’s a few items on sale.

Why? The verb must agree with its object. Since items is plural, the verb to be must also be plural. Thus, instead of is, it should be are.

If you break the contraction apart, the error becomes more obvious:

On our website, there is a few items on sale.

Instead, you should use there are:

On our website, there are a few items on sale.

2. All nationalities and languages should always be capitalized. Whether you’re English, American, German, or Chinese and from Japan, Russia, the Czech Republic, or Zimbabwe, you should always capitalize proper nouns.

3. Make sure you chose the correct form of the verb to choose. To choose means to pick out or select someone or something. The verb to select is often used interchangeably, especially on eCommerce websites.

Please choose a payment method.

Please select a shipping option.

Chose is the simple past form of to choose. Make sure you don’t use it as a call-to-action! This sentence, for example, is incorrect:

Chose your product colors.

British or American?

The two largest variants of English are British English and American English. While they are essentially the same, you should always try to align your language with your audience.

We won’t cover all of the differences between the two in this post, but here are three of the more relevant ones:

1. In British English, the contraction needn’t is often used instead of doesn’t need to:

She needn’t send more than one email at a time. (British)

Needn’t is almost never used in American English:

She doesn’t need to send more than one email at a time. (American)

2. Brits like to keep u after o in certain words, while Americans don’t. See colour (British) vs. color (American) or labour (British) vs. labor (American).

Our new sweaters are available in three different colours. (British)

Our new sweaters are available in three different colors. (American)

3. Americans usually refer to organizations and groups of people as singular nouns. For example:

The staff is..
The company is..
The team is..

Brits, on the other hand, tend to refer to groups as plural nouns, even if the word itself is a singular noun:

The staff are..
The company are..
The team are..

While American English and British English are mutually intelligible, I always recommend tailoring your newsletter to your readers. If your subscribers are mostly American, stick to American spellings (and vice-versa with British readers).

You can read more about the differences between American English and British English on Wikipedia or Quora.

Keep it brief

English-speakers the world over have one thing in common: a love of brevity (and a lack of patience). When sending a newsletter to an English-speaker, should always get to the point, and fast. As I try to practice what I preach, this section is brief. :)

Adjust for formality

Like many other languages, English has varying levels of formality. The vocabulary you use with close friends is different from the vocabulary you use with your business clients.

Unlike many other languages, however, the level of formality is not included in the verb form itself. Instead, formality is conveyed largely by word choice, tone, and other subtle cues.

As such, you should try to match the formality of your emails with your audience. If you run a blog for accounting professionals that work at large corporations, you should stick to formal language. Avoid using hi, awesome, cool or other informal words.

On the other hand, if you are targeting startups, you should aim to be less formal. Feel free to use casual language, especially if your aim is to be more accessible and less corporate.

Ending an email

Finally, it’s time to say good bye! Most of the time, the best way to end an email is a simple Thanks or Thank you. If you’d like to be more proper, consider using Sincerely, Best wishes, or Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
The MailPoet Team

Be sure to never use friendly, as the current President of France, François Hollande, once did when writing to former U.S. President Barack Obama.

Thanks for reading!
Kiefer

As a MailPoet user, you’re no doubt familiar with the ins-and-outs of email. But do you know where email came from? And who invented it? In this post, we’ll briefly cover some of the major events in the history of email.

Murky beginnings

The early history of email is a little confusing. Why?

For one, what exactly is an email? Early email systems consisted essentially of static text files on a mainframe computer, a far cry from the complex HTML emails of 2017. As a result, it can be difficult to pin down exactly when email was created.

Secondly, there were various organizations and groups working on their own separate networks. Perhaps the most well-known early network was ARPANET, which was initially developed and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. ARPANET was an early form of the Internet and most historians consider its messaging system to be the first form of email.

So, who invented email?

Ray Tomlinson, a programmer working on ARPANET for a defense contractor, is credited with sending the first email message in 1971. Tomlinson has said that he preferred “Email” over “E-mail”, as he was “simply trying to conserve the world’s supply of hyphens,” so we will thus call him the “Inventor of Email” (and not “E-mail.”) Sadly, Tomlinson passed away in 2016.

The first email

Tomlinson’s first message was just a test and funnily enough, he actually did not remember what it said. When asked, he replied,

[These early] test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them.

In addition to inventing email, Tomlinson was the first to use the @ symbol for messaging, which allowed emails to be sent to computers on different hosts. Prior to this, messages could only be sent to different users on the same computer.

Now, let’s zoom ahead to the early 1990s.

Email for everyone!

Starting in the early nineties, many ISPs, universities, and large corporations began to offer email accounts to their members. At the same time, companies like Lycos, Yahoo, and Hotmail began to offer paid or ad-supported free email accounts to anyone. Nearly two decades later, the email landscape is still essentially the same.

Spam arrives

Alas, all good things must eventually be abused. The first spam email was sent in 1978, but it wasn’t until 1994 that evil became organized. In 1994, two lawyers from Arizona decided to spam newsgroups with an advertisement for their immigration services.

Strangely enough, they didn’t deny that they were spammers and they didn’t try to hide their identities. Instead, they proudly advertised their new “marketing method” and even wrote a book about it! Luckily for email inboxes everywhere, no one bought the book.

A fun fact: the term “spam” (to mean an unwanted message) is originally derived from a 1970 sketch of the BBC television show Monty Python. Watch the skit on YouTube.

The future of email

That’s the history of email, but what’s in store next? Over the past decade, many people have predicted the end of email, whether from Google Wave, Slack or social media. Nonetheless, email soldiers on. The simplicity and ubiquity of email will keep it around for years to come.