Hey Stephanie… Amazing question. I’ve just added an HTML newsletter template that’s served me well in the past. Check it out here and let us know what you think. :)

Hi Stephanie we use it all the time. Let me find the template and i’ll send it across.

Hey Stephanie, this is a great question. It looks like @SuperShaune and @Salvo have some resources for you on the HTML template front.

I’m happy to share some of my thoughts about Newsletters. Based on my experience, here are a few ways that Newsletters can be really useful:

Reaching a specific segment of users

Newsletters allow you to select a specific set of Users, Groups, or Branches for your communication. This can save you a lot of time when compared to other methods you might use to notify users (like an email marketing tool) since it eliminates the need to export a list of users and then reupload that list elsewhere.

Sending in-app notifications

Some communication is more “nice-to-know” than “need-to-know”. This type of communication is perfect to send in the user’s notification area. This can help drive awareness of updates without “bothering” users by sending them an email. Here are a few types of communication I believe are great for in-app notifications rather than emails:

• Announcing new resources (notify users when new courses/learning plans/assets are available)
• Announcing new pages (notify users when you add pages or resources that can help them learn)
• Announcing updates to pages (notify users when you make changes to pages or add new widgets, catalogs, or channels)

Replacing an email marketing tool

Some organizations may not have access to an email marketing tool, or L&D teams might not have access/permission to use it. In these instances, Newsletters can give you a way to easily share important information with your learners without having to rely on other teams! As you mentioned, there are plenty of ways to make these emails “sparkle” and hopefully, this community can help you get the resources you need to design beautiful newsletters. I have to promote Shaune’s post once more since I love the look of that Newsletter

Lastly, as you mentioned, the Newsletter tool is limited in its ability to track information like delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, etc. that most email marketing tools provide out of the box. If those metrics are really important for you to track in your communication, then I would recommend using another tool. There are still plenty of ways to take advantage of Newsletters in conjunction with other marketing tools, and in my mind, a hybrid approach will lead to the best results!

Here’s a helpful article on Creating and Sending Newsletters in Docebo Help!

I’m curious to see how others have used Newsletters as well, so hopefully more members reply here with their ideas and examples!

Hi Stephanie.

I used the Newsletter function and liked it but my users did not care for it. We may have a different use case but all of my users are external and all of our courses are free. I used the Newsletter a few times and we would get people wanting to unsubscribe which isn’t a feature of the Newsletter. It only took a few times of our helpdesk inbox filling up to decide to got back to MailChimp. I hope this isn’t the case for you but I did want to share.

Thanks for posting this, @Stephanie Dreiling! We haven’t used newsletters yet and I wasn’t even sure of when/why/how we would!

@Stephanie Dreiling, I would like to use newsletter for our internal employees. updates to manuals, revisions, best practices, updates to what's going on with our specific industry, or new courses we push out that anyone can take… unfortunately right now our IS department is putting a stop to this until we can get around security protocols. :(

@Stephanie Dreiling - I utilize the newsletter function and send out periodic “Release Radars” highlighting new content that has been added to the platform. Anecdotally there seems to be an uptick in active users after we send out the newsletter, but it would be great if this function had (any) analytics.

I use Litmus to create newsletters and you’ll need a little bit of HTML knowledge (or willingness to Google search to find your answers), and Canva to create banners. I’m happy to share examples of past newsletters if you’re looking for inspiration.

We tried to use the newsletter functionality within Docebo, but it sadly does not support the legal requirement to allow users to unsubscribe from it. Even if it did, the UI does not allow for an admin to easily see who had unsubscribed so as not to send future newsletters to them. 

I added this as a suggestion to Docebo’s product backlog, but no word yet on its movement toward resolution. 

Following.

I think I’ve only used the newsletter function once. Because it doesn’t have any shortcodes, you can’t personalize, and at the very least I want to address the learner by name in the email. I have a little workaround that works for us but might not work for everyone. I use the email function from Courses b/c it includes the shortcodes. It works for us because everyone in our system is enrolled in a course called “Welcome to the Learning Center” which is a quick micro course (Rise) (not required) on how to use the platform. So I can basically send an email from that course. I’m not expecting a full-blown email “marketing” function out of Docebo but at the very least I would like to 1) have shortcodes 2) save previous newsletter content so I can send the same email to new users and cut/copy/paste from previous saved newsletters especially the format, and 3) be able to see the list of recipients with the sent newsletter. 

Thank you all for the details in this posting. We want to add the newsletter to our outreach, and you’ve given me a lot to think about.

@Cindy McElhinney 

@Stephanie Dreiling 

I will be upvoting your requests as I had the same thoughts.

@ideaseed Your note about letting users unsubscribe, which I agree with the regarding the policy concern—

I am under the impression that the Newsletter is basically a different way to email people so what about it requires the unsubscribe capability?

@TrishAH From what I understand of CAN-SPAM law (https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business for reference), there is no difference in the eyes of the lay between a cold email and a newsletter. Both must include your mailing address and a way to opt out/unsubscribe. 

My challenge with Docebo newsletter functionality is that, given the most common use case of sending a newsletter to all branch users (we have 4 distinct branches), we cannot practically manage opt-outs. We select the entire branch to send to, and even if people have sent us email to opt out (the only way to do it), there is no easy way to permanently manage that in the UI. We would have to pull up our list of opt-outs each time we send a newsletter and send to everyone EXCEPT those individuals, manually checking everyone who is not them. There is no way to select the entire branch and then de-select certain users that persists. 

I am not a legal SPAM expert. Just a regular person trying to comply, so I may be misinterpreting this, so I am open to correction or more info. 

Jenn

Appreciate the HTML template - that is gorgeous & super helpful. 

I would also love the ability to automate some of the newsletter - ex: top three new courses, top three most popular courses right now, etc.

That’s what I was hoping for when I looked into this functionality - a bit more like what you’d see in a traditional newsletter.