21 of our favorite industry email newsletters for content marketers
Let’s all say this together: it’s easy to find great consumer content on the web, no matter who you are or where you look.
But professional content—B2B content, industry news, or content about your industry—can be a bit more challenging to find. Pre-internet, professionals relied on trade publications for the latest updates, tips, events, and networking for their content (they still do, but the internet democratized content). In the internet age, there’s more information and content than ever for professionals in any field thanks to trade publications moving online and to brands becoming publishers. There’s almost too much content to know what the best places are to find them all.
The best place to start, in our humble opinion? Email newsletters. Curated by professionals for professionals in every field you can think of, email newsletters collect the best content for you to peruse so that you can become a thought leader—or at least well-informed—in your industry. Here’s why every professional and company needs to read and make them, as well as our favorite email newsletters for content marketers.
People really like email
Professionals like email, or at the very least, they use it all the time—even when they aren’t supposed to be working. According to this The Atlantic article, there are two types of people in the world: “those with hundreds of unread messages, and those who can’t relax until their inboxes are cleared out.” Even if you fall into the former category, a study from 2012 reports that 70 percent of work emails are attended to within six seconds of their arrival. It’s become practically a Pavlovian response to reading your emails at work, even if they pile up.
Hopefully, while you’re at work, you are working. Some benefits of subscribing to industry email newsletters as a professional:
- Distraction-free content in one compact place about the current news, best practices tips, industry trends, etc.
- Often a good way to learn what competitors are up to
- Delivered to your inbox every day/week/month so you don’t have to spend time scouring the internet
For professionals, email is an easy way to keep up to date with the industry without losing any time. You avoid the distractions that social media provides while still getting a relevant content fix. And if you find something useful? Curate it for your personal brand or the company. You’ll get a gold star for your next performance review.
Brands, publishers, and individuals should like sending email newsletters
Brands and publishers know there is a need and market for email marketing (particularly B2B email marketing). Email marketing has a long history on the internet, and that’s because they remain a solid outreach tool to measure engagement with your community (as well as the number of subscribers, click-through rates, etc.). They manage to:
- Showcase a mix of curated content and original content marketing
- Stay top of mind with companies, professionals, and individuals within your industry
- Educate and inform your community while connecting to it
- Increase traffic to your site
- Keep incredibly low costs; sites like MailChimp are practically free to use
Many brands and publishers may look at email marketing’s dwindling numbers as a sign that it’s less than relevant in the age of social media. But email marketing still generates traffic, and more importantly, it creates visibility. For brands and publishers, email marketing is an excellent way to display thought leadership in the field, an authority and knowledge about the future, and to remind people of your company and services. While engagement and numbers are important, they are not the be-all and end-all for email marketing.
Now, the question becomes this: what type of newsletter should you produce for your email campaign and how often. Should it be purely curated? Should it be purely promoting your recent blog posts and content? A hybrid of the two? And then how often should the newsletter be—daily, weekly, monthly? All of this depends on your industry, audience, goals, and more.
Below are some of the Quietly staff’s favorite newsletters that revolve around our hybrid industries and interests—tech, publishing, content marketing, work culture, the internet, etc. If you’re in any of these industries we recommend you subscribe to these newsletters so you can see first hand what tricks and devices these brands and publishers use to draw readers in. Plus, newsletters brighten up your inbox. Just us?