Rethinking Your Monthly Newsletter When You Have Targeted Emails

The last two posts covered targeting a newsletter by segment and purchase history, then timing sends to each customer’s own buying pattern. Put together, that’s a system for getting the right product content to the right person at the right time.

This raises an important question: if product content is now handled by targeted, individually timed sends, what’s left for the monthly newsletter to do? It depends on how your list is set up now, how much content you can produce, and how broad your catalogue is.

Option one: keep the newsletter as is

If you don’t have the setup for triggered, individually timed sends yet, or you’re only running this for one or two segments, there’s no need to change the newsletter at all. Product content and relationship content can keep living in the same monthly send, with the segment and subject targeting from the earlier posts already doing the work.

This is the simplest option, and it’s the right one if building a second email system isn’t realistic yet. The trade off is that a single monthly send is doing two jobs at once, driving purchases and building the relationship, and it’s harder to get the mix right when both are competing for the same few paragraphs.

Option two: split into two distinct channels

Move product content entirely into the triggered sends, early access, win back offers, new release alerts, all timed and targeted per customer. The monthly newsletter becomes something else: author interviews, editorial notes on why a title was picked up, behind the scenes content, no catalogue push at all.

This mirrors how some publishers already separate their email programs, a relationship newsletter that gives readers a sense of the publisher as a place, kept apart from promotional sends built to convert. It also matches the general pattern in email marketing, that most of what a list receives should be value or relationship content, with a smaller share doing the direct selling. The balance all depends on your business and customers.

The trade off: this only works if there’s enough editorial content to sustain a monthly send with no product angle at all. If that content doesn’t exist, the newsletter risks going quiet or feeling padded.

Option three: one send, blended per reader

Keep a single monthly newsletter, but instead of everyone getting the same email, blend relationship and product content based on segment and interest, in one email. Every reader gets both, a relationship piece and a product block based on their interest match.

This works best if you’re already producing content more than once a month, a blog publishing weekly across a range of subjects, so the newsletter can pull whichever pieces are most relevant to each reader rather than needing to write bespoke content for every subject at send time.

The trade off: this needs email tooling that supports conditional content blocks and connects with your blog CMS, not every platform does, and it needs enough of a content backlog across subjects to actually pull from. This is also where a custom-built system, rather than an off-the-shelf platform, tends to make the most sense. Stitching together your blog, order data, and email send in one flow is something most SaaS tools can’t easily do.

Option four: no monthly cadence, drop content into whatever’s already going out

Rather than a separate monthly send, drop relationship content into the next scheduled email a reader is already getting, whatever that happens to be, and slot in whatever’s relevant to them since the last one. There’s no fixed monthly rhythm at all, the content just rides along on the send that’s already due.

This works well once personal timing is in place, since it means relationship content reaches someone at a moment they’re already opening an email from you, rather than adding another send to the calendar. It also removes the production pressure of Option Two or Three, there’s no need for a steady monthly supply of content, whatever exists gets used whenever the next relevant send happens to go out.

The trade off: without a fixed cadence, some customers might go a long stretch without any relationship content at all, if their next scheduled send isn’t due for a while, and there’s no single monthly moment to point to internally as “the newsletter.”

A simple fix is a maximum gap alongside the triggered logic, say 90 days, if a customer hasn’t received any relationship content within that window, send one anyway regardless of where they sit on their personal schedule. Build in a delay window too, if their next scheduled send is already due within 10 days after the cap, hold off and let that send carry the content instead of firing a separate email just days apart. That keeps the flexibility of riding along on scheduled sends while putting a ceiling on how long anyone goes without hearing from you, without accidentally emailing someone twice in the same fortnight.

Handling customers with no interest data, under any of these

Whichever option fits, there’s still a group with no purchase history or interest signal to match on. Two approaches, run together rather than picking one:

Send them everything and watch what they engage with. Include this group in every edition regardless of subject, and track opens and clicks. A few cycles of that usually produces a signal, at which point they move into the normal targeted rotation like everyone else.

Ask directly, a little at a time. A short, optional “what are you interested in” prompt works better as one or two questions spread across a few emails than a long form up front, asking for everything at once tends to get ignored. This can be faster than waiting on engagement data, and more reliable, since it’s a stated preference rather than an inferred one.

Neither replaces the other. Some subscribers will never fill out a preference form but will click through on relevant content anyway, and some will tell you outright before they’ve engaged with anything at all.

What to decide

The choice between these comes down to two questions:

1. How much distinct content can you produce on an ongoing basis?

2. How many different reader interests does your list contain?

A narrow catalogue with one or two core subjects probably doesn’t need anything more than option one or two. A broad catalogue spanning many interests, where a single newsletter can’t serve everyone well, is where option three or four starts to be useful.

Whichever you land on, decide it deliberately rather than letting the newsletter’s purpose drift as the targeted, timed sends take over more of the product selling job.