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Newsletters on LinkedIn vs. Email Marketing

LinkedIn is the most popular professional social network and there are sectors in which it is the only one that really works. Within the functionalities it offers for publishing content, articles sent as newsletters have made a place for themselves and serve the social media marketing strategy well, but they should not be confused with the many other possibilities offered by email marketing.

What is a newsletter on LinkedIn

If you use this social network regularly, you have probably received invitations from people and companies inviting you to subscribe to their newsletters. These newsletters are native to the LinkedIn platform, which means they are created, published and consumed there. Although LinkedIn newsletters are not new, they have become more popular over the last year.

How to create a newsletter on LinkedIn

Creating a newsletter is very similar to creating a blog post. LinkedIn offers the possibility to create posts (a text with a link, PDF or photos) and articles (with a header image and usually longer). Newsletters are a way of grouping articles thematically as they have their own page on LinkedIn where users can subscribe with one click to be notified of future editions and read, comment or share previous ones.

Users and pages can create different newsletters and choose their periodicity, as well as their name and a brief description. When the first issue is published, those who follow them will receive a notice to subscribe because they will not be subscribed by default. If they do, they will receive a notification within LinkedIn and an email to read each article. The newsletter page functions more as a history than a registration landing page, so it will be automatically updated with the number of posts and the number of subscribers.

Pros and cons of LinkedIn newsletters

All social networks are concerned with keeping users within their own platform, as this benefits their ad-based business model. Their algorithms tend to give much more visibility to paid posts, but also give priority to content that links, in this case, to LinkedIn and not to external sites. Articles fulfil this function well when compared to a publication that leads to a corporate website. This is why this type of newsletter can achieve more engagement than a normal text and link publication.

In addition, it is content that is indexed in Google, so it can achieve a good positioning, but it should be taken into account that the traffic is taken to LinkedIn instead of to the website itself. This also means that you lose weight on the so-called owned media, as everything that happens on social media stays on social media. So, they can be good tools for social media marketing, but their functionalities are very limited for email marketing.

The main problem with LinkedIn newsletters is that there is no access to subscriber data. As there is no external sign-up form, all information stays within the social network. It is possible to consult a list of subscribers and aggregate statistics of their profiles are provided, but not their email addresses for use outside LinkedIn. And forget about using techniques like scraping to extract their email addresses, because you don't have their consent to send them newsletters from outside LinkedIn.

This makes it impossible to segment, personalise or automate messages as it is essential to do in email marketing. And we must not forget that, although they are called newsletters, they are nothing more than notifications of articles written on LinkedIn. That is why you cannot vary the design, nor can you use templates or even consider deliverability or analytics to improve communications.

Remember, your LinkedIn subscribers are from LinkedIn, so you are not building your own database.

Functionality	LinkedIn	Email Marketing
Contacts	You cannot communicate with them from outside the platform.	The database is yours; you have the consent of the contacts and you can send them from any email or CRM platform.
Automations	Not available	Email marketing automation allows you to send welcome, birthday and other types of automated emails.
Segmentation	Not available	In email marketing you have segmentation based on the data you have about the user and their interactions with your mailings.
Personalisation	Not available	You can personalise the content so that it fully adapts to the user's preferences and needs.
Interactions	It can help to get more followers within the social network.	Getting better interactions in email marketing is more complex and requires a good strategy and analysis of results.
Design	Limited. There are no templates and the editor offers very limited options.	Email platforms allow you to create templates and designs with no more limitations than those of the devices where they are displayed.
Statistics	Limited. Only views and increase of subscribers.	Most platforms offer advanced statistics that allow us to better understand our audience and improve the results of our mailings.
Community	Subscribers can comment, react to your posts and interact with others.	Subscribers can respond to your emails, but not interact with other subscribers.

How to combine LinkedIn newsletters and email marketing

We have seen that a LinkedIn newsletter is not equivalent to an email newsletter, so they cannot be treated as equals within the marketing strategy. For example, it is not advisable to send the same type of content to both communities, not only because there are likely to be repeat subscribers, but also because each offers a very different experience.

Social media and email marketing complement each other. The key is to combine them using the best of both channels in order to monetise them. So, instead of duplicating content, it is better to distribute it in different ways. For example: it is possible to link the headline and excerpt from a newsletter to a blog or website and make a summary for LinkedIn after a few days so as not to repeat the same content.

The freshness of the pieces should be taken into account when sending, as email is more likely to be prioritised over social media notifications. In fact, these are likely to go to a different Gmail tab than the traditional newsletter, making them less effective for a more urgent message.

It is not possible to use lead magnets in LinkedIn newsletters, but you can offer some content exclusively for this channel to reinforce the sense of community. While discounts and promotions are highly appreciated by email, on social networks it may be more interesting to provide novel information that we want to be shared and thus increase its reach.

On the other hand, LinkedIn is a good place to build the personal brand of someone prominent in the company, so you can create a newsletter to distribute your opinion on key industry issues and leave corporate news for email marketing. Both can be monthly, but perhaps separated by a couple of weeks to balance the number of impacts.

In this way, each newsletter fulfils a function and the marketing strategy takes advantage of the strengths of each communication channel.

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