Simple Curated Newsletters

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Table of Contents

1. What Are Curated Email Newsletters?

2. Why Create A Curated Newsletter?

3. Choose A Topic

4. Identify Your Content Sources & Gather Content

5. Compose The Email

6. Add A Personal Touch

7. Send lt

What Are Curated Email Newsletters?

A curated email newsletter is one that aggregates interesting and/or popular content around a specific subject. Curated newsletters find the best of the best material, and then pull it together in one place.

Often times, along with links to the contents’ external locations, the newsletter will offer a brief comment or summary about the pieces as well.

Here’s an example:

An example of a curated email newsletter

Why Create A Curated Newsletter?

There are many reasons people take the curated newsletter approach. For many, it helps build their businesses by:

Staying top-of-mind with subscribers
Building thought leadership around their brand
Sharing interesting findings and resources

Curated newsletters are a chance for you to offer readers a vast variety of material you’ve hand selected for them. And with so much content being published on the web, a curated newsletter has serious value.

So on that note, let's dive into the steps you should take to create your very first curated newsletter.

Choose A Topic

Will your curated newsletter contain email marketing tips & tricks? Or will you be curating content about web design trends? Choosing your topic is one the most critical parts of starting a curated email newsletter and there are 2 key things to consider when creating your curated newsletter:

Audience — The value for your subscriber audience is having the best content around a particular subject selected and sent directly to them. This means the topic and content needs to be aligned with your audience’s expectations and interests.
Business Alignment — The goal of creating a curated newsletter is to keep your business top of mind and establish your brand as a thought-leader. For this reason it is important to ensure your content relates to your brand and the products you are selling.

Finding the balance between these two items is where you will find the right topic for your newsletter.

Identify Your Content Sources & Gather Content

The first step to creating great curated email newsletters is to choose trustworthy content sources. These can be favorite blogs, industry news websites, YouTube channels or other online sources.

Finding trustworthy and high-quality content sources is one of the most important tasks associated with creating a curated newsletter.

If they produce regular content that you know your audience loves you'll want to add them as a content source so you can drag-and-drop content from them directly into your curated newsletters.

Compose The Email

If you are a FeedOtter customer you can use the curated campaigns feature to drag-and-drop content from any website or rss, social, YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram feed directly into your email design. FeedOtter also includes lots of great curated newsletter templates to make designing your first newsletter a quick and easy process.

If you are not using FeedOtter we highly suggest using a visual editor such as the free BEE editor to manually add each content item to your email. This can be a tedious process and requires manually laying out the email and the content images, titles, and descriptions manually. (hint: this is why we built FeedOtter)

Select and re-order the content for each newsletter

Our drag-and-drop curated email newsletter builder allows you to craft the perfect mix of content in a matter of minutes.

Adding personalization to a curated email newsletter

Add A Personal Touch

One key to a successful curated email newsletter is personalization. One of our favorite ways to accomplish this is to add a personal greeting at the top of your curated newsletter. This personal greeting should include:

The first name of the recipient, merged in from your ESP or marketing automation software
A 2-3 sentence message highlighting posts in this issue as well as any other timely, relevant and personal bits
A signature such as “Andy and the FeedOtter Team” or even better an actual multi-line email signature

Send lt

With your email designed, content selected, and personalized message written it is time to send your first curated email newsletter.

If you’re a FeedOtter customer, you can select one of our email integrations and schedule your curated email to send from Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, or MailChimp directly. This is ideal since all open, click, and unsubscribe tracking stays in your existing email system.

Outside of FeedOtter you will need to copy your email HTML into your email sending software ensure all the links and unsubscribe functions are working perfectly.

In either case we using an email testing tool such as Litmus to ensure your email looks great.

Once you’ve tested your newsletter, you’re ready to hit send on your first curated email newsletter!