How to Write an Internal Company Newsletter: Structure, Ideas, Free Templates

A company newsletter, also called an internal or employee newsletter, is a recurring email that a company sends to all its employees to share company news. Its job is to replace scattered announcements with a single email employees expect. A message in a busy chat channel scrolls out of view as new ones arrive, while a scheduled email stays in every mailbox until someone opens it.

This article covers newsletters for employees. For a newsletter your customers receive, start with what belongs in a customer newsletter; for a business-to-business list, see our B2B newsletter guide.

What belongs in every edition follows from that purpose: employees should know where the company is going, see their colleagues' work recognized, and have the dates, deadlines, and how-tos their jobs depend on.

A good edition has four sections: a lead story, people and wins, at least one useful item such as a how-to or the dates for an upcoming event, and a recurring feature such as a poll. With the same structure every time, readers learn where to look.

Sending it on a fixed day makes it predictable, so employees can make reading it a habit.

For the name, pick one that says what the newsletter is or when it arrives, and prefer a plain name to a pun. Here are a dozen to start from: The Monday Memo, The Weekly Huddle, Inside [Company], The Bulletin, The Loop, The Rundown, The Digest, First Friday, The Wrap, Between Teams, The Noticeboard, One Company.

The 20 ideas below come in four clusters, one for each section of the newsletter: the lead story, people and wins, the useful item, and the recurring feature. Pick one idea from each cluster per edition, then rotate.

• One decision explained. Say what changed and the reasoning, for everyone who was not there when it was decided.
• Internal launch news. Announce a launch before customers see it, with the one line employees can repeat when someone asks.
• The quarter in review. Summarize how the quarter went in plain words, at whatever level of detail your company shares internally.
• New customers and partners. Introduce each one and say what it means for the teams it affects.
• Policy changes. Pair every change with its reason, so employees can see why the rule exists.

• New hires. Introduce each one with a photo, their role, and one non-work fact colleagues can start a conversation with.
• Team interviews. Interview one employee per edition about what their team is building and what they need from the rest of the company.
• The month's biggest win. Tell the story with the numbers behind it, so the praise says what the team achieved.
• Work anniversaries. List anniversaries and milestones, because a decade at the company deserves more than a calendar notification.
• Promotions and role changes. Announce them as soon as they are final, with one line on what the person will be responsible for.
• Shout-outs. Publish the ones colleagues submit about each other, which turns readers into contributors.

• Tool tips. Let one team teach the rest a tool or shortcut they use daily, one how-to per edition.
• Benefits. Explain one employee benefit per edition, with how to use it.
• Dates and deadlines. List the ones ahead, from enrollment windows to office closures.
• Ask the expert. Have a named internal expert answer one question colleagues ask often.
• Recommendations. Recap a course, book, or conference a colleague would recommend, in their words.

• Photo themes. Collect photos on one theme per edition, such as desks, pets, or the last offsite.
• Polls. Ask one question per edition and share the results in the next one.
• Quizzes. Write a short quiz about company history or products, with the answers at the bottom.
• Seasonal editions. Give the December edition a seasonal design with one of the Christmas and New Year templates.

How often to send depends on how much material a normal month produces. Count the wins, hires, dates, and stories worth leading with: if they fill one edition, send monthly, and if they fill two, send every two weeks.

Then keep to the send day. Padding an edition with filler wastes readers' time, and skipping a month breaks their habit of reading, so when a month is thin, send a shorter edition instead of skipping it.

A template fixes the structure once, so each edition changes only the content. The four below come from the business category of Topol's template gallery (Topol is our drag-and-drop email editor), and all four are free to use: you customize and export them at no cost with a free account.

• Strategic Marketing Blueprint opens with a large header image and one featured story above smaller sections, which suits an edition built around one lead story.

• Simple Elegant Email Template has a photo header, a row of three icon columns, and an image beside text, so short items each get their own block.

• New App is Out shows one update per block, each with a phone mockup for an app screenshot, which fits launch announcements and product news.

• Conference Event is an event invitation with a schedule, speaker photos, and a registration button, which fits an all-hands or a company event.

If your colleagues read email in Outlook, the design has to work in Outlook. Classic Outlook for Windows renders email with Microsoft Word's engine, so emails can look broken in Outlook while looking fine elsewhere. Topol compiles every template through MJML, the open-source email framework, into the table-layout HTML that Word's engine displays reliably, so emails designed in Topol render correctly in Outlook, including versions as old as Outlook 2000.

Two features of Topol PRO, the paid plan, cut the repeated work of a recurring send:

• Saved blocks. Save the header and footer once and reuse them in other templates as independent copies.
• Multilingual templates. For an international workforce, design the edition once and swap the copy per language.

In Topol PRO's editor, you build the layout from blocks in the left panel, and the settings for whatever you select appear in the right panel.

When the edition is ready, export it as an HTML file for the sending platform your company uses. For teams without one, Lettr, Topol's sister product, sends campaigns and newsletters, billed per contact and free for up to 500 contacts. Topol PRO exports templates straight to it.

Three signals show whether employees read the newsletter, and only two of them appear in your sending platform's report:

• Open rate. Watch the trend across five or six editions, because one send's numbers vary too much to judge by.
• Clicks. They show which ideas readers act on. When an idea gets no clicks for three editions, replace it with another idea from the same cluster.
• Replies and submissions. When colleagues answer a poll, send shout-outs, and suggest stories without being asked, the newsletter works.

Decide the four sections, the send day, and the template once, and each edition only needs new content from the idea bank. After that, the three signals above show which ideas to keep.

Create a free Topol account and design your first edition from a free business template.