8 employee newsletter ideas to keep colleagues updated and engaged

We use these employee newsletters for many reasons. They’re great for updates, team news, organizing events, and even onboarding new hires. These regular messages ensure we all feel connected as a globally distributed remote team 🤗.

The result is that, as a business, we know a lot about employee newsletters. In this article, we'll share our best tips and examples with you.

Short on time? Click here to head straight to the examples.

An employee newsletter is a newsletter sent within your organization by email. It is a way to share company news, build morale, and generate excitement about the great work your people are doing.

These newsletters can go out on a regular schedule every week or month. Or you can send them whenever you need to share company information. You can also create multiple internal newsletters for teams, departments, and topics. 

Small companies can send newsletters using regular email software. But the best internal employee newsletters are built using specialist email software like MailerLite. This allows you to create beautiful designs and access valuable features. 

For example, you can add in-email surveys, share videos, embed content from social media and add countdown timers. 

These tools also let you control who gets each email. For example, with MailerLite, you can easily use the audience segmentation tool to split your list into groups based on department or role. You can then choose which segments to send each email to.

You probably use a tool like Slack to communicate internally, so why bother sending a newsletter too? Can’t you just drop an announcement in #general and call it a day?

You could, technically. But communication sent in this way often gets lost among the other content your team sends. What's more, these messaging tools aren't suited to the longer-form content usually found in internal newsletters. 

Putting this information in employee email newsletters is a better option. Yes, writing great email content and sending the newsletter takes time, but there are also many benefits. 

These include: 

• Regular communication reinforces company culture

• Each team learns what other teams are working on 

• Employees stay in the know about company happenings and upcoming projects

• People feel more connected which improves team spirit and employee satisfaction 

• The messages stand out from your existing channels, increasing the chances that people read them

• Newsletters look better than plain-text emails 🙂

The result is that your entire organization feels more connected and information isn’t kept in departmental silos. When everyone is on the same page, achieving common goals is much easier.

Creating a new employee newsletter can be complicated. Here are 6 questions to answer that will help streamline the journey.

🎯 What’s the main goal?

Each employee newsletter should have a clear goal. Consider creating newsletters for each use case you have in mind. 

For example, you may create a company-wide newsletter that updates people about the business, as well as departmental emails for each team. You may also have separate emails for events or for new hires. 

Being clear about each newsletter’s goal helps you create useful content that your employees look forward to receiving. 

📅 How often will you send the newsletter?

At MailerLite, we send newsletters on different schedules. Each team sends a monthly newsletter that recaps everything they’ve worked on during the previous month. 

But other newsletters are less frequent and go out when people have something to say. We also have newsletters that relate to specific events such as new employees coming on board or birthdays. 

😎 Who’s in charge?

Creating an internal newsletter is a team effort. But one person should take the lead. This person will collect all input and take care of the newsletter's content, format, and design.

⏰ When will you send the newsletter?

Deciding to send your email newsletter at a specific time does two things: it lets employees know when to expect the email, and it gives you a deadline to work towards. 

Also consider the time zone of the people who will receive the message. Global teams can schedule emails for suitable times in each area. Every employee receives the email at a time of day that works for them. 

Read more: The Best Time to Send Your Emails  

📨 Who will receive the newsletter?

Newsletter software like MailerLite allows you to send your internal newsletters to the entire company or a select group.

These groups could be based on departments, location, or seniority. You can even create emails for specific reasons, such as onboarding new hires or preparing for events. All you have to do is segment your subscriber list into different groups so the right person gets the right email. 

🎨 What design will you use?

Employee newsletter tools make it super easy to style your design exactly how you want to. With MailerLite’s drag-and-drop email editor, you can choose from our huge library of content blocks, including features like images, social embeds, RSS feeds, and videos. And you can customize each one to match your company branding. 

But you don’t want to do this every time you send an email. Instead, spend some time creating a template with blocks you can use repeatedly. You’ll save time, while still creating a great looking newsletter. We also have 80 email newsletter templates you can use to get started.

In this next section, we’ll introduce 8 employee newsletter ideas. These are all types of internal newsletters we have used at MailerLite. We’ve also showcased a newsletter example for each one. Feel free to copy these concepts for your own internal newsletter marketing strategy.

1. Monthly company newsletter

We use our monthly update newsletter to ensure everyone knows what’s happening in the company. Ours is written by the People & Culture (human resources) team, but management could easily be in charge of this. 

This strategic newsletter aims to keep people up-to-date with our product, goals and achievements.

We share:

• Who has joined our team

• Company updates

• New content releases

• Support team updates and stats

Here’s an example of the type of content we send out.

2. Department newsletters

As MailerLite grew, it became harder to keep up with what other people are working on—especially as we’re a remote-first company. This is why some of our teams started to send their own newsletter.

In our first marketing monthly newsletter, our CMO Ilma shared:

• Results and takeaways from projects we’ve been working on

• Newly published content

• Stats about our visibility and growth

Here’s what that looked like (sorry, we had to leave out some confidential parts!).

Our project managers do the same in their newsletter.

These newsletters are sent to the entire team. But you could send them to specific people, such as team leads or the management. This is a good way to keep your leadership team up to date.

3. Employee onboarding newsletters

All new employees go through an onboarding process. This involves reading material, signing up for services and getting familiar with how things are done in the company. You can easily convey this information via an automated internal newsletter.

We’ve set up a workflow that automatically sends a welcome email whenever we add a new email address to the list. These automations are easy to set up inside MailerLite.

In the onboarding email, we introduce tools, share links to important sources and give a small, fun homework task for the next day such as reading case studies.

If you create this type of email, add the information that makes sense at your company. This could be anything from recommended neighborhood lunch spots to a welcome video or company information.

4. A newsletter to hand new employees the mic

How much do you really know about the new people in your company? If you’re a fast-growing company and the person isn’t working in your team, the answer is often not that much.

Our brain can more easily remember names when they attach them to a story or reference. For example, I remember Alberto from Support because he’s a boss at baking Japanese cheesecakes. This fun fact makes him stand out, plus it’s a great conversation starter.

As a company, you could create an email template with premade employee profile questions that new hires must fill out and send on their first day. Kind of like a friendship book, but digital. It’s a fun way to increase employee engagement!

5. A newsletter for employer branding

Newsletters with the goal of employer branding could include anything from highlighting team members to sharing pictures from your last company party. Include any content that celebrates your values, teams and the individuals contributing to the company’s success.

At MailerLite, we often send these types of emails before, during and after workations. These are our biannual get-togethers that we use for team bonding. 

We create a dedicated landing page using MailerLite to inform everyone about the workation. When it’s finished, our COO Ilma sends a survey email so everyone can provide feedback about what they liked and didn’t like about the program. 

The built-in survey feature makes it easy to create this email. Ilma just needs to drag the survey block into her newsletter, and it’s ready to go. She can then add several open-ended questions, a satisfaction score and a thank you message as the outro. 

6. An internal newsletter for special events

Special company events and milestones can be anything from monthly call announcements to game nights, after-work drinks or the Christmas party. Sending an internal newsletter is an easy way to keep your people up to date about these events. 

Events could also be for celebrations like birthdays or work anniversaries. While our Slack channel #birthday-wishes fills up with cake and balloon emojis every time our team members have a birthday, it’s also nice to send a birthday email on their special day.

If you use MailerLite for your company newsletter, you can add personalized text to each email that shows the employee’s name. 

Here’s an example.

Explore how to personalize your company newsletters with our in-depth guide.

7. A newsletter to announce new products

Keeping your organization up to date with new products and features is tough. But people must know about your latest offerings. An internal newsletter is a great way to keep your teams updated. 

When our developers were almost done with the beta version of our mobile app, they wanted to announce it with more than just a chat message. For the occasion, our designer Ignas created a stylish announcement email.

8. An internal newsletter for weekly digests

Our Slack channels are continuously packed with new content. In #random we post articles, memes, jokes, and more. In #marketing_resources, we share interesting studies and articles. 

Weekly digest newsletters are a good way to share roundups of this content or to highlight messages that might have gotten lost. These newsletters educate and entertain your employees.

You can make these long-format newsletters interesting by including lots of formatting and visual features. Make sure to add different headlines, multimedia, surveys and separators.

Using specialist software for your employee newsletter gives access to engagement metrics.

These show how people at your company interact with the content you send. You can use this to discover the type of newsletter people most enjoy. 

Here are the three most important metrics to view.

📧 Open rate

This is the percentage of people who open the email you send. Increase your open rate by using an enticing subject line, sending your email at consistent times, or letting people know you've sent the email in your other communication channels. 

🖱️ Click-through rate

This is the number of people who click on one of the links you include in your email. It’s important if your email is designed to push people towards a particular piece of content or page on your website.

A high click-through rate also shows that people are not only opening, but also reading and interacting with your content.  

Improve your click-through rate by including interactive blocks like surveys and quizzes, or by segmenting your employees into groups and sending relevant content to each one. You can find out more about how to personalize your emails here. 

🖥️ Device 

This shows the device people use to access the content. You’ll likely see that people open your emails on both mobile and desktop. This metric is a good reminder to ensure your employee newsletters look great on each type of device.

Internal newsletters are a great employee communications tool. Use them to keep your people up to date with the latest happenings within the company and more. 

There are an endless number of topics you can create emails for. If you get creative, you can send some really fun and engaging newsletters that’ll boost team spirit. 

For your next steps, we recommend:

1. Decide the type of email you want to send. Perhaps start with a regular company update and an employee onboarding workflow.

2. Decide who will be in charge. This person will be responsible for creating the email and sending it out on time. 

3. Experiment with newsletter designs. Create a beautiful-looking email newsletter template that you can use repeatedly. Or use one of our professionally-designed email templates as inspiration.

4. Upload and segment your emails. Upload all your employee emails into the software you use. You can then segment these emails by department or role. 

Once you’ve completed these steps, you'll be ready to send out your first employee newsletter.  

How will you use your company newsletter for internal communication? Let us know in the comments below