It is over-fashionable to declare the death of email, or simply to forget about it, when it is, still, such a well-used and essential tool in modern business. The buzzy and now-omnipresent rise of social media, short-form video, and algorithm-driven feeds grabbing attention and headlines, has led many to forget about the power of the simple (or not-so-simple) newsletter, making it a relic of the early internet.

In recent years, after widespread exhaustion with the endless potential – and endless sludge of the internet – newsletters have made a big comeback. As opposed to many other formats (think TV, news, film), newsletters have only been superficially impacted by the rise of digital platforms. A now-50-year technology is taking 2025 by storm. Now is the time of the newsletter. Newsletter and social subscription service Substack raised $100 million in a funding round that valued the company at $1.1 billion, just this past summer. The Guardian alone has 59 current newsletters. The Financial Times has more than 55. The Economist, 31. Bloomberg, 70.

Newsletters have long been a tactic for organisations or individual writers to engage with their readers. For readers, newsletters are a trusted source of consolidated information, relevant either on a personal or professional level, (or, in an increasing number of contexts, both). Sent directly to their inbox, the reader receives curated content that they signed up to get, out of their own initiative. This is key: readers have specifically signed up to read what is being offered; thus, handily, they want to use and engage with what they get. Newsletters are an effective way to get information to people without a constant stream of bothersome push notifications from an app.

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Top newsletters have over a million (extremely engaged) subscribers, with 90 percent of Americans alone subscribed to at least one newsletter. And many people are subscribed to multiple newsletters!

Newsletters have another silver bullet in today’s media news environment, beyond being directly sent to people’s inboxes: they are personable, and therefore email newsletters are viewed as one of the most trustworthy sources of information available today. Thanks to the personal reading environment of the inbox, creators often feel like friends or advisors to their subscribers, deepening the connection.

Email has structural advantages. It scales cheaply, with the cost of sending an email to 10,000 readers rarely higher than to 1,000. They also offer precision, and detailed analytics offered on many platforms show who opens, clicks and unsubscribes, along with graphs and charts to track growth.

Some publishers are yet to allocate resources that appropriately match the width of the newsletters’ window of opportunity. Many new newsletter providers have swept into the space and become media forces. Think of New York’s Emily Sundberg.

When pitching to newsletters, a new world opens up to you, as each newsletter has a unique editor, who is not as inundated as, say, the op-ed editor of that paper with pitches, despite the hit being as good or better than regular news items, as the subscribers are so likely to read the content, given newsletters’ high engagement rates and niche, loyal readerships. At newspapers, newsletters can function almost like standalone verticals, so PRs need to treat them as distinct channels rather than extensions of the main publication.

Here are some top benefits of setting up an effective newsletter:

• They keep you front-of-mind as often as you want, be it weekly or daily. Target audiences like potential new faculty or students need to remember your organisation if they want to be study or join you. By landing in their inbox on a regular basis, your thoughts, insights, and programmes stay in the reader’s mind.
• They position you as an expert in your field. Your newsletter gives you a chance to share specific knowledge with readers who can benefit from it. A newsletter can help you become a leading voice in any industry.
• They offer easy tracking. Email marketing services often provide detailed analytics for e-newsletters. This includes who opened and clicked on the email, which links they clicked, which email addresses bounced, who unsubscribed and the percentage of desktop vs. mobile opens.
• They generate content. Your newsletter can serve as your content generation engine and provide the foundation for a broad content marketing programme that includes blogs, social media posts, and other content assets.

And here are some top tips on a great newsletter:

Make sure the writing is high quality. Your newsletter is a reflection of you/your business so make sure the writing quality is top-drawer. Try to make sure what you are writing is personal and offers value.

Publish regularly. Regular publication builds familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. Trust, over time, leads to sales, referrals and resilience, even in difficult markets. Aim for weekly or even daily e-newsletters.

Include lots of useful, non-promotional information in your newsletter. By offering something helpful and interesting, you’ll encourage sharing and subscriptions.

Help people want to open your newsletter. People decide in mere seconds whether to open and read a newsletter or not, so make sure each newsletter has a flashy headline, a good subtitle, and that you let people know what is included in the newsletter in a quick round-up. And make it friendly and personable. And, again, offer value.

Don’t oversell. Readers are quick to tune out hard-sell messages. The most effective newsletters sell indirectly. Provide insight, analysis, data, writing, content, indeed, any material that the reader finds useful, depending on your field. Allow trust to do the rest. Over time, this approach generates qualified leads more efficiently than pushiness.

Write for a Distracted World. Readers are busy. Content must respect their time. That means short paragraphs, clear subheadings, and an economy of words. Subject lines must be concise. The aim is to make the decision to read as easy as possible. Pop culture references or trending topics can help if they are relevant. But novelty should never replace substance.

Email newsletters are not the most glamorous tool, but they are a fantastic and reliable one. They are not new, but their time-tested resilience over the years, and recent resurgence in popularity, is proof of their enduring. usefulness. Put simply, they work. They reach audiences directly, at low cost, with measurable impact. They build authority and trust over time, with low input costs. Even today, this late in the digital era, the humble newsletter remains one of the most effective tools for anyone with something important to say.

Author: Thomas Willis

Tom has a doctorate in English and Classics from University College London, a master’s in Classical Reception from UCL, and spent a year as a graduate researcher at Yale University. Spending so long in universities, Tom has an in-depth understanding of how they operate, and how they best work, he has developed a deep admiration for research, and wants nothing more than to see academic research read by more and affecting the world in powerful ways.