- CEO newsletters can be a valuable way of boosting team morale and broadening your professional network at the same time.
- For Acceleration Partners founder Robert Glazer, a weekly motivational email to employees now reaches an audience of over 180,000 readers in 60 countries.
- Glazer's "Friday Forward" newsletter has allowed Glazer to make connections with readers around the world and has sparked his writing career with speaking engagements and book deals.
- Here's how the communication strategy worked for Glazer, and what entrepreneurs should keep in mind when starting one of their own.
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In January 2016, Robert Glazer wrote an email to the 30 employees of his affiliate marketing agency, Acceleration Partners, about how to set goals for the new year.
The email, which Glazer called "Friday Inspiration," contained a quote from Thomas Jefferson and a story about how his son learned to stop sucking his thumb.
Glazer's employees, all of whom work remotely, seemed to respond to the positive message, Glazer said. So the next week he wrote another email, this time about learning from failure .
Over the next few weeks, he wrote about living in the moment , making a vision board , and valuing experiences over physical gifts .
Four years later, Glazer is still sending weekly inspirational emails, although they now come in the form of a full-blown newsletter called "Friday Forward," available by email subscription and on LinkedIn.
His company now employs 130 people, although these days, his audience is a lot greater than just them — the newsletter reaches readers in 60 countries with over 100,000 subscribers and 180,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Forge stronger connections
Glazer told Business Insider he started the tradition to help his employees feel closer together.
He also wanted to add his own voice to the crowded field of motivational writing, much of which Glazer said "was a little too rainbows and unicorns for me."
Some of his employees soon began forwarding them to friends and family, but he said the tipping point came in the summer of 2017.
After he attended a business conference and plugged the newsletter to other executives he met, the emails really started to gain traction.
"I've been doing this and it's been working really well," he recalls telling other attendees, encouraging them to start their own newsletters.
"It's a great way to be connected to your employees," he added.
Soon, entire companies and professional networks were signing up for Friday Forward, and now Glazer estimates he has readers in 60 countries.
One reader messaged him to "look for a bunch of signups from Portugal," and another told him they were reading from Angola.
Go beyond brand messaging
Glazer's newsletters aren't officially affiliated with his company, and he doesn't get paid to write them, although he's been able to leverage their popularity into a writing career.
He published his first book on the affiliate marketing industry in 2017, and his second on mentoring and leadership in late 2019.
For Glazer, his global audience simply means more people he can reach with his positive message.
He said each week he receives around 30 or 40 emails from readers who connect with that week's message.
"I have a folder full of emails that people have shared pretty vulnerable stories," he said. "Every week when I think like, oh, maybe I'll take a week off, you know, it was the fact that it was helping someone that I kept doing it."
"The value for me is that I like to share ideas that help people and organizations grow," he added. "It's fun to be connected with people, and it's created all kinds of interesting introductions and connected me to people all over the world."
Don't just mail it in
Whether writing for an audience of thousands — or one reader at a time, like another CEO who hand-writes thousands of personal notes — it's important to remember the human element.
According to guides from marketing services Hubspot and Constant Contact, the most effective newsletters strive to be brief, conversational, light on the sales pitches.
"An effective email newsletter should be branded, have a short and snappy subject line (around 40 characters)," said Constant Contact's Director of Content Marketing, Dave Charest, in an email to Business Insider.
"The content should be broken down into three sections: What are you offering (headline); how will it help the reader (message body); what should the reader do next (call to action)," he added.
In addition, Charest says that when you send your messages can be almost as important as what you're saying: "It's best to look at your email data to figure out when you get the most opens and then send your emails consistently at that time."
Lastly, if the newsletter is going to be any good, it is going to require real work — Glazer says having a following means he now needs to put more thought than ever into his writing.
"It also puts a lot of pressure on me. I just know that every Friday there's a big audience," Glazer said. "And honestly, it forces me to work even harder making sure I deliver value. I don't feel I can lay an egg anymore."
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