The Eight Types of Emails

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Take a quick look in your inbox and find some emails from a big news publisher — say, the Wall Street Journal. I’m a long-time Journal subscriber, and in just the past few weeks, they’ve sent me daily and weekly newsletters. They’ve sent me marketing messages about events they’re hosting. They’ve sent me newsletters built around teaching me new skills, like the WSJ Investing Challenge. They’ve sent me emails asking if I’d like to sign up for even more newsletters.

This is just a fraction of the Journal’s email strategy — they offer more than 50 different newsletters total, plus all of the other emails about my subscription or marketing messages they’ll send my way.

Not too long ago, an email strategy this sophisticated would have been reserved for teams as large and sophisticated as the Journal. Not anymore. Lots of newsletter operators — those at publishers, non-profits, ecommerce businesses, and even those running their own indie newsletter — are asking the same questions as they build out their email strategy:

• What types of newsletters can we send to engage with our readers?
• What kinds of marketing messages should we send?
• What kinds of automations do we need to drive readers to take specific actions at specific moments?
• What kinds of emails should we send after a reader makes a purchase?

It can be dizzying to try to wrap your head around all of these options. The deeper you dive into the email world, the more you realize there aren’t just a few types of emails you can send. Best-in-class organizations and operators might send up to eight different categories of emails, each with a specific purpose in mind:

1. Traffic-driving newsletters
2. Destination newsletters
3. Alerts
4. Courses
5. Pop-up newsletters
6. Transactional emails
7. Automations
8. Marketing emails

Some of these types of emails are what I’d call “ongoing newsletters.” They’re designed to go out regularly (daily, weekly, monthly) and showcase content or ideas. They might include some calls to action, or CTAs, to donate or buy a product, but that’s not the main point of the email.

Others are what I’d call “short-run” newsletters. They look like other newsletters, but with one exception — they’re only sent for a brief window of time.

The other emails aren’t newsletters at all. They’re designed to get readers to take action during a specific moment, often (but not always!) connected to a purchase.

You don’t need to send something in all eight categories to have a great email strategy. But even an indie operator — someone writing a newsletter themselves, without the support of a larger org — could easily send emails in four or five of these categories.

Which of these emails makes sense for you? I’ve put together a guide walking through each category to explain what they are, what they achieve, and how they fit together to help you build the right email strategy for you.

Traffic-driving newsletters

A decade ago, most newsletters in the news world were built around the idea of driving traffic. When I asked colleagues why they wanted to launch a newsletter, they often said, “I want more traffic to my stories, so I thought a newsletter could help,” as though I had a million readers in my back pocket who were just itching to find something new to read. 

There are still plenty of newsletters whose primary purpose is to drive traffic back to a website or another platform. These are often daily or weekly newsletters, with a handful to a few dozen links. News organizations love these because they can curate a list of top stories and get readers back to their site. Non-profits love them because they can drive readers to specific resources, blog posts, or videos. Even indie operators use them — this is what I do with the Inbox Collective newsletter! Every week, I highlight one big story in my newsletter and encourage readers to click through to read. By sending readers to my site, I can provide a better reading experience (a lot of the examples I share or interactive elements, like video, look a lot better in a web browser than in the inbox) and also track how long readers spend reading my stories.

These types of newsletters have evolved a lot over the past decade. Not long ago, many traffic-driving newsletters were just an RSS feed of stories sent via email. Now, we see a lot more curation and much more thought going into the design of these emails.

Here’s one from the New Yorker. When I worked there, we took steps to curate the stories that went into the daily newsletter, but since I left, they’ve gone even further, adding an intro and in-newsletter recommendations from their staff. They also write longer blurbs to tease stories — not just the sentence or two we used to use. But the goal of this newsletter is still to drive readers back to the New Yorker’s site. They don’t give away too much within the newsletter because paid subscriptions drive their business model. Trying to cram multiple 1,000+ word stories into a newsletter would be a technical nightmare. Instead, they push readers to click back to the site — and if you’re not a subscriber, hopefully, you’ll choose to pay to access the stories behind the paywall.

Another great example comes from charity: water, a non-profit that provides clean drinking water to people around the globe. Many non-profits like theirs basically only send fundraising pitches, but best-in-class non-profits send a mix of editorial-focused emails and donation asks. The more you can nurture that relationship and show readers the impact of your work, the more likely they will give when you ask them for money. So, in a traffic-driving email like this, they’re trying a few tactics, including a quiz that links back to a longer story about the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and links to a few projects their team has worked on recently. The goal is to get readers back to their website, where they can educate readers and show a variety of CTAs.

Destination newsletters

These newsletters don’t try to get readers to click out — they want to keep readers in the inbox. Most of the content is provided right there as you scroll through the email. While a Destination newsletter may include a few external links, the newsletter itself is the destination.

When I think about Destination newsletters, I first think about the indie newsletter world. Those types of newsletters often use the Destination format because it works well with their business models.

A newsletter like The Gist is a fine example of this. Their daily email recaps the day’s news in sports, from the NFL and NBA to women’s college volleyball. The Gist doesn’t cover all these sports themselves — they curate from dozens of different news sources every day, and they do link out to these sources — but the goal is to bring all of that reporting into a single source so you can catch up on sports news in a few minutes. If you read the newsletter from start to finish, you might stumble upon a story you’d otherwise miss. In their case, this aligns with their primary revenue stream: advertising. They have native ads embedded within the newsletter, and as you scroll, you see ads presented in the same style as their editorial content.

There are more writer-driven newsletters on indie-friendly platforms — from AWeber to Substack — than ever before, so many of them keep their content within the inbox. A great example comes from a former colleague of mine, Chris Geidner, a legal expert who covers America’s court system. For non-lawyers, trying to understand what’s happening with the law is incredibly hard, so a newsletter like Geidner’s Law Dork helpfully exists to translate what’s happening into plain English. A typical edition of Law Dork might walk readers through a recent Supreme Court ruling, including screenshots from the legal briefs and then explain what those actually mean. The result is a story, anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand words, that you can read entirely in the inbox. This works well with Geidner’s business model: Law Dork is supported by reader subscriptions, and since the newsletter is his primary publishing outlet, there’s no need to drive readers elsewhere. 

Alerts

Alerts are shorter newsletters designed to let readers know when a new, specific type of content is published. Breaking news alerts from newsrooms about can’t-miss big stories are the most common. Here’s an example from the Park Record in Park City, Utah — it’s an email with breaking news about a real estate development that’s been discussed for months. The Park Record will follow up later with more detail in their daily newsletter, but for a big story like this, they want their audience to know about it right away.

If you send breaking news alerts, discuss with your team what “breaking news” means to you. Where’s the bar for sending out one of these emails? I’ve worked with newsrooms that sent breaking news alerts not because they were big stories but because they hadn’t sent an email that day and sensed they needed to send something. That’s a no-no in my book: If readers sense you’re filling their inbox with stories that don’t match their expectations for breaking news, you’ll probably see many unsubscribes.

But an email doesn’t have to be about breaking news to be an Alert. These newsletters can also be useful for telling readers about new content they’ll want to read, listen to, or watch. For instance, the Atlantic publishes a column called Dear Therapist. But they only publish one column monthly, and you’re unlikely to remember when it goes up. So they’ve got an Alert that goes out every time they publish a new column.

Other teams send an Alert when they publish a story on a specific topic or feature, like a puzzle or the e-edition of the newspaper. If you’re trying something like that, make sure readers can easily sign up via a landing page and change their preferences through a preference center.

Courses

Courses are newsletters that teach readers a new skill, habit, or lesson. But unlike most newsletters, which might go out every day, every week, or every month, Courses have two unique features: 

1. They’re automated, so if you sign up today, tomorrow, or a year from now, you’ll get the full series of emails. (Courses are built a lot like a welcome series — you set up the series, and the emails start going out as soon as the reader signs up.)
2. They’re designed to run for a short window of time. Some courses last just a few days, while others last a few weeks.

The first Course I ever worked on was at BuzzFeed, where we launched the 7-Day Better Skin Challenge. Every day, we’d send readers some simple tips to help you look your best. The response from readers was incredibly positive — readers loved that each newsletter included a short lesson and a specific action to take at the end, and they valued the fact that we found experts to write each Course. Plus, these emails funneled many readers toward our regular newsletters, like the thousands who signed up for our Health & Beauty newsletter.

Courses make a lot of sense for big newsrooms, like the Washington Post, that have launched courses around baking and cooking healthy recipes. They can work for non-profits, like the Project On Government Oversight, which launched a course about navigating the federal government’s bureaucracy. They’re also a great fit for any indie newsletter with an Expert business model — you’ve got the expertise to share with readers and can build either a free Course or one that readers will pay for.

One of my favorite examples of Courses comes from the Open Notebook, a non-profit that teaches science journalists new skills. They’ve launched seven Courses over the years, including ones about improving your interviewing skills and pitching stories to science publications. To build these courses, they’ve partnered with an expert, Emily Laber-Warren, who runs the Health and Science Reporting Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Every Course is broken down into a clear set of lessons, and each email includes a small homework assignment or next step. They feel like classes that would be taught in journalism school.

While these Courses require a lot of work to put together, they’re also evergreen, which means you can build the Course once and promote it for years to come. The Open Notebook launched its first Course in February 2021; readers are still signing up for it four years later.

Pop-up newsletters

A Pop-up newsletter, like a Course, is a short-run newsletter designed to run for a brief period. The difference is that Pop-up is sent in real-time, usually pegged to an event or moment on the calendar.

Here’s a great example from CT Insider. In 2022, when podcaster Alex Jones was being tried for defamation, they launched a Pop-up to cover the case. Readers were incredibly interested in the trial, so instead of trying to cram all of their reporting into their daily newsletter, they built a special product just for the hearings.

Many news organizations will launch a Pop-up to cover events like elections or the Olympics — moments with particular reader interest. Those readers might not be interested in a daily Sports newsletter but may want one just to cover the World Cup. (And at the end of the Pop-up, these orgs can nudge readers to sign up for a related newsletter.)

A Pop-up doesn’t need to be connected to a news event. The Philadelphia Inquirer has a Pop-up newsletter called Down the Shore, a weekly email that runs throughout the summer to cover events and news from New Jersey beaches. What’s especially nice about Down the Shore is that it’s something they can bring back every year. It runs from Memorial Day through Labor Day, sits dormant for a few months, and then returns the next Memorial Day. Even though it’s a Pop-up, it’s also an audience they can grow over time.

A Pop-up can also be a way for a writer to build a newsletter that fits around their schedule. Author Robin Sloan publishes a personal newsletter built as a Pop-up — it’s more like a season of a podcast than a normal newsletter. He’ll publish a few newsletters with a specific theme or format for a few weeks, then disappear for a while. The theme and format will usually change when he returns with a new season. I usually advise creators to be consistent with their publishing schedule, but by building a newsletter as a Pop-up, Sloan creates a different relationship with readers. They don’t expect a newsletter every week — but when they get one, it’s a special treat.

Transactional emails

I consider the first five types of emails in this list — Traffic-driving newsletters, Destination newsletters, Alerts, Courses, and Pop-up newsletters — to be newsletters in that they’re emails with an editorial focus. They’re about building relationships or sharing content. They might include a CTA to buy something or support your work, but their goal usually involves engaging with the audience.

The final three types of emails on this list are a bit different. They exist to drive a specific action at a specific moment — often connected to a purchase.

The first are Transactional emails. You’re probably familiar with a few versions of these emails:

• A confirmation message with a receipt after someone buys something from you.
• A reminder that your credit card is set to be charged soon.
• A CTA to update your payment information when your credit card lapses.

As the name implies, these emails are usually tied to some sort of transaction: a reader pays for a subscription, becomes a paying member, donates to your organization, or buys something from you. (Sometimes, they’re tied more to an action instead of a transaction, like when you request an email to reset your password.)

Here’s a great example of a Transactional message from the team at Tangle. A week before a reader’s membership renews, they send a Transactional email letting readers know about the upcoming charge. But instead of using boilerplate language, Tangle’s Isaac Saul injects personality into the email. He thanks readers and reminds them why their support matters. Consider trying a similar tactic with your Transactional emails: Sending an email with voice and a clear message might do better than one that’s bland.

Automations

There are lots of different types of Automations that you could set up, including:

• A welcome series, sent after a reader signs up for your newsletter.
• A reactivation series, sent when a reader doesn’t engage with your newsletter for a long period of time.
• A post-purchase series, sent after a reader buys something from you. (This is a series that usually goes far beyond a one-off Transactional message — a series might include several different emails, each featuring a specific personality or CTA.)
• An abandoned cart series, sent after a reader makes it to the purchase page but doesn’t complete the process.
• A winback series, sent when a reader fails to renew their subscription, membership, or donation, and you want to try to get them to support you again.

The common theme with all of these Automations is they have a specific trigger that sets them off (i.e., a reader signs up for your newsletter), and each email has a specific CTA for the reader. For instance, a welcome series might include an initial welcome email, an email built around showcasing your top stories, and a CTA to buy a membership, like Vidar Bergum does in his welcome series.

Most email platforms make it easy to set up multiple Automations — once you’ve set up the Automation, it’ll run in the background without requiring you to click “send” on a regular basis. Some email platforms even allow you to A/B test different versions of an Automation to help you identify which series is most effective at driving the desired results (opens, clicks, purchases, etc.).

Marketing emails

Finally, there are Marketing emails. These are explicitly designed to sell something or promote something. There are a lot of different ways to market to your readers. Maybe that’s trying a sale or special deal — like this offer for 40% off a subscription from Bloomberg. (Using a countdown clock, like Bloomberg does, can be an effective tactic to drive sales.)

Maybe that’s an email asking readers to become members and support your work, like this email from Sioux Falls Simplified.

Maybe that’s a CTA to buy a ticket or attend an event, like the one I sent to readers last fall for a webinar I co-hosted.

Or maybe that is a paid marketing message, like this one sent for a sponsor by the Daily Memphian to a targeted segment of their audience.

If you send Marketing emails, make sure to think about who needs to receive the message. Is it the entire audience or just a segment of your readers? Do you want to offer some sort of opt-out so readers can unsubscribe from these types of emails in the future without unsubscribing from all of your newsletters? That’s a tactic I highly recommend, particularly if you send emails for sponsors or send lots of emails during a fundraising campaign.

How all these pieces fit together

As you’ve read through this guide, you might have identified one or two types of emails you could add to your strategy. For instance, it’s great if you regularly send a Destination newsletter, but you also probably want to add some Automations (like a welcome series or reactivation series) into the mix. And if you regularly promote events or a paid subscription, you should think carefully about Marketing emails, too.

You’re probably not going to send all eight types of emails. But if you send at least one of these types of emails, chances are, you’ll be building out a larger email strategy sooner rather than later.

With each type of email, consider what metrics you want to use to measure success. For a Traffic-driving newsletter, you’ll probably track clicks or time on site after someone clicks. For Destination newsletters, clicks aren’t as relevant, so you may want to look at reader feedback or surveys to understand what’s working. If you only use one metric, like open rate, for all of these types of newsletters, you may not get a clear sense of what’s really going on with your newsletter.

One final best practice: If you don’t have one already, check with your email service provider about setting up a preferences center for your readers. One common mistake I see is when someone suddenly starts sending many different types of newsletters — but readers can’t easily change the emails they receive. When that happens, a reader is likely to unsubscribe or even mark your email as spam, which can have major consequences for deliverability. Make sure to include an easy-to-find preferences center in your footer — don’t bury this in a block of legalese or hide it in a tiny font — you may even want to occasionally send emails inviting readers to change their preferences, too.

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