Many Office 365 users asking how to send nice looking email newsletters to colleagues. Preparation of the engaging newsletters in the Outlook applications could be a challenge, so maybe using SharePoint will be the easier way to build great looking newsletter?
Thankfully building a modern-looking newsletter in Office 365 is a really easy job and do not require technical knowledge from you. All you need to have is a SharePoint site!
Building an engaging newsletter will give you an additional communication channel that will bring your colleagues to the most important information that you want to share with them. You can use this tool to:
- inform about changes in the department
- present success storied of your team
- share project case studies
- introduce new employees
- invite your colleagues for the team events or meetings
All of that you do just by using your SharePoint site. If you do not have your own SharePoint site or your site does not have described function you can create a new one based on the below tutorial.
Create Office 365 newsletter
In the first step, you will need to create content of the newsletter that will be sent to your colleagues.
1. Create SharePoint Site
To start your work you will need to have SharePoint site that allows you to create the newsletter. To create SharePoint site follow article How to create SharePoint Communication Site.
If you cannot find the link to Create Site button you will need to contact with your IT service team for the creation of the site. Click here to get the email template that you can send to IT Administrator.
2. Publish interesting news
On your SharePoint site, you will have the possibility to gather interesting announcements that you will be able to share with your colleagues. In the article How to create great announcements on Office 365 you will find the tutorial that will guide you through this process.
Remember that first impression done by your newsletter will strongly depend on the visual side of your announcements. During the preparation of every news try to focus on the catchy header and great leading pictures.
You will find more tips related to the preparation of the beautiful announcements in the linked article.
Send the SharePoint newsletters
The final step of our process is sending an email newsletter to our colleagues. Generation of news digest will take no more than 2-3 minutes. Remember that you will need to have content of announcements already in place.
1. Preparation
Before you will send the newsletters to prepare three key elements:
- Choose 4 to 7 key announcements you want to share
- Sort them from the most to the least important
- Nominate the list of colleagues to whom you want to send the newsletter
Prepared content can be also used for the creation of the Office 365 newsletter template. Every newsletter you will create on SharePoint will be saved as a template that you can reuse in the future.
2. Open the announcements
To send the newsletter open SharePoint site that contains the News section and open view of all announcements.
By choosing to See all button you will display all announcements.
3. Start generation of the newsletter
Just click on Send a news digest button.
4. Choose announcements that you want to share
Ticking the boxes next to the post (1, 2) will be required to choose posts for newsletter content. When you will be ready to click on Next (3) button.
5. Compose the email content
In the final step, you will need to compose all information that will be sent in the email notification. You will need to fill in the form and set chosen news, by:
- (1) Headline – put here catchy headline information for your colleagues. If you are planning to send a regular newsletter to your users it is worth to put the date at the beginning of the headline. An example you can use:
Example #1
Check out news from Sales teamExample #2
5 great improvements done by Sales team this monthExample #3
We deliver! Check our success stories
- (2) To – type here the recipients of the message
- (3) Message Body – you can put here an additional message that will be displayed in the top of the email message. From the perspective of the way how newsletter is built, I recommend putting here one sentence that extend the essence of the headline.
- (4) Remove button – remove news from the newsletter
- (5) Move button – change the order of the announcements
- (6) Send news digest button – send a prepared newsletter to your colleagues
6. Enjoy the results of your work!
Your work is done. Your colleagues in a few seconds will receive the great looking newsletter prepared by you.
Automatic Office 365 newsletter
Microsoft introduced the automatically generated SharePoint Online newsletter. Users will receive a newsletter summary of the news published across the organization SharePoint sites. The feature is fully automatic and currently does not have a configuration. Office 365 nominate relevant information and personalize the sent newsletter for each user
The automatic newsletter for Office 365 is currently during rollout. It will be available at the end of the 2020 year globally.
How automatic SharePoint newsletter select the news
- Only published news posts that are relevant to the user, and that the user has not viewed yet.
- The only news that the user has access to.
- The maximum number of news is ten.
- The maximum number of automatic newsletters per week is one.
How Office 365 newsletter nominates interesting news posts
Using the power of Microsoft Graph, based on criteria:
- When someone in the user’s direct management chain publishes a news post
- When someone a user works closely with publishes a news post
-
When a news post is published to a site that the user follows
Can user unsubscribe from auto news digest
To unsubscribe from the auto-news digest emails you need to choose the unsubscribe button on the bottom of the email
F.A.Q.
Can I send the newsletter to people outside my organization?
Yes, you can. To send news digest to external partners you have to share the SharePoint site with them first. Detailed instruction about sharing your SharePoint site with the external users is described in the article How to share SharePoint site with external partners.
Can I put recipients in BCC field?
Unfortunately not. All recipients will be displayed in To field and email address will be visible to each other.
Can I automate the newsletter sending process?
Automation of the sending process is possible but will require technical support form IT service team.
Can I copy the list of recipients to the newsletter?
Not directly. You can use SharePoint group to easily manage recipients of the message. More details on the SharePoint Group creation you will find in the article How to create SharePoint group.
Can you archive the emailed newsletter
Yes you can. The newsletter will be saved as a separated page-file in the Page library. You will get there by opening the Site content.
Thanks Szymon
You are welcome 😉
Hi Szymon –
Do you have any examples that provide subscribe/unsubscribe, opt-in/opt-out capabilities?
I apologize if this is already a well-known feature of Sharepoint Online/Office 365, but I’m not familiar with it – thank you!
Hi Eric, It is possible to use Microsoft Forms to build: subscribe, unsubscribe forms. You can embed them on SharePoint, Teams. The challenge is that if you need to manage the subscribers somewhere. To do that you can use Power Automate. As you can see there’s not out of the box way. Managing that aspect will require some “development” using Office 365 Apps.
Here is the article how to build forms on Microsoft Office 365
Thanks so much, I’ll start reading!
Hi Szymon
Thanks for your post , I try It’s works fine !
A little question, is it possible to change the newsletter header ? For exemple add an image.
Best regards
Serge
Hello Serge,
There’s no out of the box way to customize the message layout of the message.
You have two alternatives:
– simple but manual – sent the newsletter to yourself, change the layout and forward it to your colleagues.
– complex but automatic – build solution to sent the newsletter via Power Automate. You should assume this will require a lot of work to get valuable results.
In this case solution is very simple, but you cannot change its look & feel.
Hi Szymon,
Great !! Some times it’s not necessary to look for a solution very far 😉 ! Some time I forgot this think !!!
Tkx a lot
#SIMPLEBUTMANUAL
?
Hello Szymon,
A little question…
do you know a solution to integrate in each section that composes a newsletter some properties of the pages that compose the newsletter.
Thanks a lot
Ser@e
Unfortunately it is not possible. in such case, we getting back to #CompelexButAutomatic model 🙂
arghhhfff !!!!
Thx 😉
Hi Szymon !
How are you today ? 😉
I am looking for how to apply a notion of profile on page content. Let me explain, I would like the content of the same page to be different depending on the profile of the person who consults it (the profile may correspond to membership of a particular security group).
I found the notion of audience which can be activated in a web part. I see that when activated it applies to the security group defined in the properties of the page that contains the web part.
But that does not meet my need.
Is there a solution to “profile” a page?
Thkx a lot
You can easily filter the Document libraries and List per logged user using item-level permissions. Unfortunately, to get a similar experience for the page content you will need some custom code web part which will adapt to logged user and load the data from data source in the background (SharePoint List).
Are their any analytic tools for the newsletters?
Not yet. This feature will get massive improvement soon, but at current moment there’s no analytics behind.
Hello – is it possible to integrate features from MS Suite of tools (like Polly for polls/surveys) into the newsletter?
Hi Lynda,
At the moment this not possible. The only workaround way is to prepare dedicated news that will contain a survey created in Forms and publish it. Then include the news in the newsletter. A nice pool graphic could bring user attention.
Hi Szymon,
is there a limit in the number of recipients, and of news you can add to a newsletter ?
thanks for your help and have a nice day !
This is really good question. Unfortunately, there’s no clear information about it. I expect there is some limit in the background.
Hi Szymon,
I see that the newsroom SharePoint automatically sends out a ” news you might have missed email”.
Is it possible to send the news digest to a channel or specific group directly within Teams?
Or it only sends out news digest as emails?
Thanks much
Today you can only send it via email. You can use Power Automate to bring that message and publish it to Microsoft Teams.
Is it possible to track – 1. Newsletter email open rates 2. Click throughs, if a newsletter is created through Sharepoint?
Hello Madkura, not at the moment. Probably it will be possible in the future. Such features require ConvertKit, MailChimp or ActiveCampaign.
Hi Szymon,
At our Intranet page I can see the news section, but there is no “see all” button. So I´m not able to select more than one Newspage to share.
Do you know how to fix that?
best regards
Try this address: https://DOMAIN.sharepoint.com/sites/SHAREPOINT_SITE/_layouts/15/news.aspx