Everyone is talking about the importance of marketing newsletters. Marketers and business owners go to great lengths to craft newsletter masterpieces that will engage the audience and promote brand image.
In comparison, an employee newsletter to a marketing email looks like an ugly stepsister to Cinderella—far less glamorous at best and disposable at worst. A minor character no one cares about. And with an average employee receiving around 121 emails a day, a poorly composed employee newsletter may cause more irritation than excitement. So how do you fight that? What topics should you include in your company newsletter? What newsletter format to choose?
We’ve got you covered. Here’s all you need to know about creating a company newsletter, along with creative content ideas and tips.
What Is an Employee Newsletter?
An employee newsletter, company newsletter, or HR newsletter is an internal periodical digest that keeps everyone in the loop about what’s happening in the company. Traditionally delivered via email, it often contains information about the company milestones and important events, welcomes new hires and highlights existing teams, lists training opportunities and job openings.
A good employee newsletter engages as well as informs. It’s easy to access and read, has a professional look, and reflects the company’s values and style.
Want to create outstanding employee newsletters?
Why Is Creating an Employee Newsletter Important?
When done right, an employee newsletter can bring you a lot of benefits. It has the potential to become a key internal communication tool at your organization. Plus, it is a wonderful way to reinforce your company values, build a strong internal brand voice, and help people stay connected in the world of hybrid and remote work, where it’s much more difficult to gather everyone together. Here are just a few reasons to create an HR newsletter:
- Improves internal communication: People get informed about the latest updates, goals, and achievements.
- Instills a sense of belonging: Employees feel included and engage deeper in the company’s life.
- Enhances transparency: Sharing important company news and decisions builds trust and loyalty.
- Encourages collaboration: People are more likely to work together when they understand what every team does and how they can be mutually useful.
- Strengthens company culture: The content you choose to share and your tone of voice reflect the company values and help keep everyone aligned with them.
What to Include in Your Company Newsletter?
#1 Celebrate company milestones
This company newsletter idea seems simple, but it’s effective nonetheless. In the era of remote working, it’s more important than ever to keep everyone in the loop. Product announcements, media highlights, landing a big client or taking part in a major conference—sharing this will give your team the sense of connectedness we lack so much nowadays.
#2 Share benefits enrollment and updates
Being transparent about the benefits your company provides and how employees can enroll is a great way to bring people value. Make sure to give people the opportunity to reach out and ask questions, and be proactive when it comes to changes in the available benefits packages.
💡Pro tip: You can simplify access to your benefits programs by sharing them as digital Benefits Guides. Share your guides as links, track who views them, and get direct feedback via built-in contact forms.
#3 Give spotlights to your employees
Sometimes, even in small companies, people from different teams have only a vague idea of what is going on in other departments. If that’s the case in your workplace, creating an employee spotlight newsletter will be a great idea. Giving the mic to a specific team or an individual is a fantastic way to let people know what’s happening around them. It strengthens the feeling of camaraderie and helps people find a new appreciation for the hard work everybody does. Also, you can use an employee recognition platform to honor employee achievements.
The perfect format for this newsletter section is an interview or a slice-of-life, showcasing a typical working day. You can also encourage people to share their passions, be it music, mountain biking, or gardening. Everyone loves the ‘behind-the-scenes’ genre, so it’s bound to succeed. Keep it short and sweet though, and don’t forget to include lots of genuine photos. And videos!
Source: Built In
#4 Celebrate birthdays and other major life events
Individual milestones are as important as the corporate ones. Welcome new babies, celebrate work anniversaries, and note small achievements. Let people share their excitement and maybe brag a bit. It will boost everyone’s morals and help you build a strong and close-knit community. This work newsletter idea will bring lots of fun and warm memories, too.
Take a look at how SN honors their staff in this lovely flipbook newsletter:
Create yours
#5 Offer training resources and opportunities
Internal enewsletter is a great way to inform your staff members about the training your company offers. This work newsletter idea makes a lot of sense for everyone, too. New hires will benefit from the links to single guides, handbooks, or even entire onboarding series. Existing employees will definitely be interested in webinars and conferences that will help them to advance in their careers.
#6 Include leisure tips and recommendations
Looking for less obvious corporate newsletter ideas? Check out your Slack channels. Chances are they are bursting with all kinds of recs and discussions: books to read, places to go to, movies to watch or not to watch under any circumstances. You may find an occasional cat video, too.
Don’t let these treasures go to waste. Make them a part of your corporate culture, and you may find that it has become the most popular newsletter editorial among your employees. If nothing else, it will be entertaining. And who knows—maybe it’ll grow into something bigger, like your company’s very own movie club. Instead of it being all about work, use it as a tool to spread a bit of happiness and to improve their overall well-being.
#7 Share customer stories and reviews
You may think that customer stories are only good for promoting your products and services to potential clients, but that’s not true. Nothing brings a greater sense of accomplishment than seeing people utilizing and loving your product. And including a customer story in your company newsletter gives your employees just that.
Let your colleagues see how your product helps improve people’s lives. Include actual quotes and testimonials from your customers. And if you’re producing video interviews, share those too, to maximize the impact and enjoyment.
💡Pro tip: With FlippingBook, you can turn your corporate newsletter into a digital flipbook and embed videos and links right into it. This way your readers stay in the newsletter all along and enjoy a clean, seamless experience with all the content.
#8 Share competitor news
Surprised? Don’t be. First of all, it’s good to keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to the state of the industry, be aware of what your rivals are doing, and how you can stay on top. For marketers, following the competitors and trends are in the job description.
But taking this kind of information outside of marketing has its benefits too. People may find some insights and come up with fresh ideas, feel elevated when they know your company is the leader in the field, and get a boost in motivation to innovate when other players on the market get ahead.
#9 Share job postings
Including job opportunities into your staff newsletter is a good idea for two reasons. Firstly, if some of your employees are considering a position change, it’ll be a great way to keep talents within the company.
Secondly, even if people aren’t interested in the current openings, they will be pleased to be a part of a growing and evolving company. They can even help you find the right fit for the job by sharing the posting from the HR newsletter within their network.
Source: Really Good Emails
#10 Run polls and surveys
From polls on the contents of the office food bar to formal satisfaction surveys, gathering your employees’ feedback is never a bad idea. It helps nurture a healthy workplace climate, gives you insights into your organization’s strengths and possible issues, and generally shows that you care. Want to maximize the participation? Try offering gift cards for coffee or books—a small gesture can go a long way.
Creating a survey and linking it into your staff newsletter takes 10 minutes, and the trust it builds is invaluable.
Source: Really Good Emails
#11 Offer at-home work tips
Remote workers sure appreciate the comfort of their home and coworking spaces, but they are at risk for digital devices fatigue, loneliness, and blurred work-life boundaries. 72% of remote workers also state they are less likely to take a sick day, even when they need rest. All these factors can lead to burnout and loss of productivity. So make sure to remind your remote and hybrid employees of the importance of good work-life balance, healthy routines, task prioritization, and regular breaks.
💡Pro tip: This section of your corporate newsletter can also include stories from ‘experts’ within your team—sharing experiences across teams can greatly boost morale.
#12 Welcome new hires
Starting a new job is always stressful. As a new team member is learning the ropes and trying to fit in, you can alleviate some of the stress by giving them a spotlight in your newsletter. It shouldn’t be anything grand—just a few lines, maybe a fun fact if the person feels comfortable sharing it, and some welcoming words.
#13 Feature employee pets and vacations
This could be a fun little idea for your company newsletter to make everyone feel happy and relaxed. By sharing bits and pieces of their everyday lives and adventures, people become closer, understand each other better, and improve communication—and all that in the most fun way possible.
#14 Add event reminders
Depending on the number of events your company organizes, it might be a good newsletter idea to include reminders. On the one hand, the event itself will go smoothly, with everyone important ready and present. On the other hand, your employees will feel you care about them, which is always a good thing for maintaining a healthy work environment.
How to Craft an Effective and Fun Company Newsletter
The competition for people’s attention is running high when it comes to emails, so what can you do to improve your newsletter’s chances for success?
✅ Learn what your audience wants. This is the sure-fire way to engage people with your content. Ask around or run a survey and jot down employee newsletter ideas from employees themselves. Plus, people will be more motivated to read the newsletter when they feel like active participants.
✅ Make your copy compelling. And don’t mind the length! If your newsletter content is relevant to the audience, they will keep reading. While emails are best kept short, you can have both—short emails and rich, interactive newsletters.
✅ Personalize your company newsletters. Personalization can be as small as addressing your reader by their name. Or you can go to greater lengths by segmenting your audience by department and language, in case you have resources for producing localized content.
✅ Add videos, links, and GIFs to increase engagement. Let’s be honest—people want to be entertained. Videos, images, GIFs, and surveys work great and keep people motivated to read further. But make sure the experience with all content is as seamless as possible, otherwise, it may be distracting and more of a hindrance than help.
✅ Optimize for mobile screens. Your newsletter should have clean design and be easy to read on mobile devices. People read on the go nowadays, and your colleagues are no exception. No matter what important things you have to say, if they can’t read them, all your efforts will be wasted.
✅ Be consistent. Habits build over time, and that applies to content habits, too. If you want to have a loyal readership, people should know when to expect the next newsletter issue. It doesn’t mean you should post frequently though. Bi-weekly, monthly, or even quarterly—choose the pace that works for you, stick to it, and you’ll see how opens and views grow.
✅ Optimize your employee newsletters for greater impact. Experimenting and tweaking your content based on its performance is the key to success. How do you know what’s working and what’s not? By asking people directly through surveys and polls, and looking at engagement metrics. When sharing via email, that would be opens and clicks, but we can offer something even better.
Take Your Newsletter to The Next Level with FlippingBook 🚀
FlippingBook lets you turn ordinary PDFs into interactive flipbooks. It’s the perfect format if your content is too lengthy for emails, and you’d like to give it a more professional look.
Here are the benefits of the flipbook format in a nutshell:
⭐ Videos, GIFs, and surveys work right within your newsletter—you can instantly liven up your content with video greetings and fun little animations.
⭐ Document tracking lets you see how many people open your newsletters, how long they read them, which pages they look at, and more. This way, you can measure impact and tweak content based on data, not on assumptions.
⭐ Multiple sharing options. As flipbooks are link-based, you can also share them in different ways—via email, social media, corporate messengers, or as embeds. The choice is yours!
Bonus: a Free Canva Company Newsletter Template
Want to set up your company newsletter, but not sure where to start? FlippingBook has partnered up with Canva, an easy design tool, to help you create your interactive newsletter in no time!
Here’s how you can do it:
- Take our free company newsletter template and customize it with your texts and images in Canva.
- Connect FlippingBook to Canva and send the newsletter straight to our tool. If you don’t have a FlippingBook account yet—no worries, you’ll get a free trial account automatically.
- Add interactivity to your newsletter with FlippingBook. You can add your branding, links, videos, and GIFs to make your content more engaging.
- Grab the direct link to your ready interactive newsletter and send it to your team in the next email.
- Make sure to check the stats sometime after sending the link. FlippingBook's analytics can tell you how many people viewed your content, how long they spent reading it, and much more.
Setting up a proper company newsletter definitely takes lots of time and energy, but it will pay off in better communication inside the company, happy and productive employees, and a creative environment.
We hope, with our newsletter tips and ideas, you are now equipped to create a perfect employee newsletter of your own. Just remember—be bold, creative, and compassionate, and your colleagues will fall in love with what you write.
