Newsletters for Printers: Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right

If you ask most marketing people this question, they will tell you to do both. That is the right answer, but the reason matters more than the advice itself.

Email is fast, cheap, and measurable. You can send it monthly without breaking a sweat, and you get real data back — open rates, clicks, who read what. But email also fights for attention in a crowded inbox, and even the best-designed HTML newsletter can land in a spam folder or a promotions tab.

Print does something email cannot. It shows up in a physical space, sits on a desk, and gets passed around. A well-designed print newsletter has a shelf life that an email never will. It also says something about you: you are a printer, and you put your own name on something that looks this good. That matters to clients who are considering handing you their next job.

If resources are limited and you have to pick one, start with email. It is significantly less expensive to produce and distribute, and you will learn from the data before investing in print production. But the most effective programs we have seen run both, treating the email as a monthly touchpoint and the print piece as a quarterly or bi-monthly anchor.

Here is the most important thing we can tell you about newsletter content: your readers do not care about your new press installation. They do not care that you just earned a G7 certification, moved to a new facility, or hired a new customer service manager.

They care about their own problems. They care about making their marketing more effective, helping their boss justify the print budget, and not getting burned by a vendor who overpromises. If your newsletter helps them think through those things, they will read it. If your newsletter is a company update, they will not.

The rule that works is 80/20: eighty percent of your content should be educational, useful, and focused on the reader’s world. Twenty percent, at most, can be about you, your company, or your services.

The good news is that if you do the 80 percent right, the 20 percent takes care of itself. When you write about the right paper stock for a high-end direct mail piece, or how variable data printing drives response rates, you are already marketing your capabilities without saying a word about yourself. Your expertise is the ad. The content is promotional without being promotional.

Frequency and length are where a lot of newsletter programs quietly fall apart. Printers either commit to a schedule they cannot sustain, or they produce something so long that nobody reads it.

On frequency: once a month is the sweet spot for email. It is frequent enough to stay top of mind, and not so frequent that you become noise. If you can only manage every other month, do that consistently rather than going monthly and then going dark for three months. Consistency matters more than frequency.

For print, quarterly is a realistic starting point for most print shops. If you can do bi-monthly or monthly, great. But quarterly, done well and done consistently, is far better than monthly done sloppily and then abandoned.

On length: keep it shorter than you think. Email newsletter articles should come in under 375 words. Print articles can go up to 400 or 500 words, but shorter is almost always better. The trend in business content has been moving toward brevity for years, and newsletters are no exception. Your readers are busy, and they scan before they read. If your article looks like a term paper, they will not start it.

For a print newsletter, you have two basic format options. A single-article format, typically a two-page folded piece, works well for monthly programs because it is fast to produce and focused. A multi-article format, four to eight pages, works better for quarterly publications because it gives people more to read during a longer gap between issues. It also gives the piece more physical presence, which makes it more likely to stick around on someone’s desk. Our eight things to consider post covers this in more tactical depth.

One of the most common questions we hear is: how do I know if my newsletter is working? The short answer is: look at your open rates and click rates, and compare them to what is actually happening in the market.

Industry-wide email benchmarks across all sectors in 2026 put average open rates at around 20 percent and average click rates at about 2.4 percent. Those are the numbers you need to beat.

Our newsletter programs for printers consistently run at roughly twice those averages. That is not luck and it is not a one-time result. It is what happens when you send content that is genuinely relevant to a focused, well-maintained audience.

What drives those numbers? A few things. The content is written by someone who understands the printing industry, so it is immediately relevant to the people on the list. The lists themselves are clean and targeted, meaning they go to actual buyers and influencers, not random contacts harvested from a business directory. And the programs are consistent, so the audience actually expects to hear from you. Deliverability also matters — if you run email in-house, it is worth reading up on DMARC and inbox deliverability.

A 40 percent open rate means that when you send your newsletter, four out of every ten people on your list are opening it. For a list of 500 buyers, that is 200 people actively engaging with your brand every single month. No cold call delivers that kind of reach.

Content is where most newsletter programs stall. People start with good intentions, publish two or three issues, and then run out of ideas or run out of time. Both problems are real, and both are solvable.

For a printing company, the content universe is actually quite large. Your clients and prospects deal with marketing decisions constantly. They are thinking about print versus digital, about direct mail formats, about paper selection, about how to brief their print vendor without getting a surprise on the invoice. Every one of those topics is a newsletter article.

Some reliable categories that tend to perform well include practical guidance on print specifications, explanations of processes that clients often misunderstand (how digital printing compares to offset for short runs, for example), case studies of successful campaigns with your name attached, and trend pieces about what is happening in direct mail or wide format or whatever category you serve.

The topics you want to avoid are the ones that only matter to you. Staff anniversaries. Press installations. Trade show attendance. These things are fine in a company update email, but they do not belong in a newsletter whose job is to make your readers smarter about print marketing. Our why a newsletter piece has more on this philosophy.

One practical approach: keep a running list of questions your customers ask you during the sales or service process. Every single one of those questions is a newsletter article. If three clients in the last month asked you about the difference between a saddle-stitch and a perfect-bound booklet, that question is sitting right there waiting to be an article. Write the answer the way you would explain it in a phone call, add a few practical details, and you have a useful, credible piece of content.

This matters more for printers than for almost any other business. When a client receives your newsletter, they are not just reading the content. They are looking at it the way you look at their work. If the layout is awkward, the typography is inconsistent, or the color reproduction is flat, they notice. You have set a standard by being in the printing business, and your newsletter has to meet it.

This does not mean your newsletter needs to be a design showpiece. It means it needs to be clean, legible, well-structured, and professional. A consistent masthead, a readable body font, good use of white space, and thoughtful image selection will get you there. What you want to avoid is something that looks like it was assembled in a word processor on a Friday afternoon.

If you are producing a print newsletter, consider printing it at your own shop. Yes, that takes internal capacity, but the piece becomes a sample. Every person who receives it is holding a demonstration of your print quality. That is marketing that pays in two directions at once.

The single biggest predictor of whether a newsletter program works is consistency. Not design quality. Not content brilliance. Consistency.

Marketing research is pretty clear on this point: repetition builds familiarity, familiarity builds trust, and trust drives purchase decisions. A newsletter that shows up reliably every month, month after month, does something that a one-time mailer or a sporadic email blast cannot do. It trains your audience to expect to hear from you. Over time, your name starts to appear in their mental shortlist when a print need comes up.

The flip side is that an inconsistent newsletter can actually hurt you. If you send three issues enthusiastically and then go quiet for six months, the message received is that you started something and did not follow through. That is not the brand impression you want to leave with the buyers you are trying to cultivate.

This is precisely why most successful newsletter programs are handled externally rather than in-house. Not because internal teams cannot do it, but because it is very easy for internal teams to deprioritize it when things get busy, and things always get busy.