While newsletters are long-time staples for outbound marketing and direct mail campaigns, they’re sometimes overlooked for digital marketing, despite being one of, if not the most effective tools available.

Newsletters greatly boost the reach of your content, and should be integral to any content marketing program.

Remember, content marketing includes both push and pull actions—readers receive alerts about relevant content and also browse through websites to find relevant information. Newsletters are the perfect medium for pushing content to your target audience.

Newsletters are easily read on nearly any device, and are a powerful way to nurture an already existing audience as you strive to engage them and drive qualified leads for your sales team. This post explains why you should consider an email newsletter, which newsletter format to choose, and how to create the correct cadence.

Why Newsletters?

Newsletters are an essential element of closed-loop marketing campaigns where you produce content and measure the results. There are several business benefits. Newsletters have the power to:

• Encourage increased traffic and repeat visitors to your website
• Make it easy to determine who’s receiving, opening, and accessing additional content on your site
• Educate your target audience on a consistent basis, boosting brand awareness, affinity, and lead nurturing

Choose the Right Format

There are three different types of newsletters marketers typically use: corporate, lead nurturing, and curated. Each has a purpose and place in your marketing strategy.

• Corporate newsletters are designed to keep customers and prospects apprised of organization updates. They summarize recent announcements and press releases. This kind of newsletter typically appears monthly or quarterly.

• Lead nurturing newsletters seek to engage and influence prospects along your sales funnel. They include product and solution educational materials, sales information, and marketing offers. Their frequency is tied to your sales cycles and promotional campaigns.

• Curated newsletters build awareness of a topic, your organization's perspective on that topic and your audience's understanding of that topic. These newsletters are a mixture of third party and original content. (The perfect mix is 65% created content and 25% curated content, according to our Content Marketing Tactics Study.)

They should be published on a regular basis—weekly or even daily—depending on the topic and how often new information is appearing.

These newsletters are sent at a relatively high frequency and have a high open rate. A well-curated newsletter is not intrusive and is not necessarily viewed as an unsolicited interruption. It can be communication subscribers find useful when delivered to their inboxes.

Stick to a Schedule

The schedule counts. If you establish expectations and stick to that cadence, people will become used to your email arriving at a set time and be more likely to open it.

According to Curata’s recent business blogging survey, 39% of the best business bloggers send newsletters at least once weekly. These marketers know how to stay in front of their audience.

If there’s simply not enough content for a weekly or daily newsletter—that’s where content curation is incredibly useful: it supplements less frequently created original pieces to ensure you have a consistent stream of quality content.

Increase Sophistication With Segmentation

Newsletters are an important part of any content marketing toolbox. They work very effectively in conjunction with lead generation activities, such as collecting subscribers from a trade show or corporate website. Once you establish a subscriber base through a newsletter, you can become even more sophisticated with your outreach. Using automation and email marketing tools, you can segment your audience and nurture their interests by sending customized newsletters.

Newsletters are an awesome way to engage and nurture your audience until they’re ready to buy. But it’s vital to send them on a regular basis with high-quality, relevant content—using curation to economically provide additional content. For more insights about how newsletters fit into a content marketing program and curation activities, Curata’s eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation offers useful information for everyone from beginners to pros.

Pawan Deshpande is the founder and CEO of Curata.