Many newsletteres I receive in my inbox go straight to the trash bin. Usually because there are too many images, useless articles about how great the publisher is and how the world will never be the same without them, depressing Letters from CEOs, and so on. You get the sense.
We attempted a newsletter sometime ago and ended up doing the same things that make me throw the other newsletters away, so we stopped it after a couple of issues.
Now we are starting again with a new "Gupta/Centura Migration .NET Newsletter". Clearly the newsletter is about the world-wide effort to convert legacy Gupta/Centura (and now Unify) systems to Microsoft .NET using our technology. That's what we sell, and making a newsletter about the virtues of eating apples doesn't make much sense.
However, the goal is to keep it short (1-2 pages) and on point with the intention to inform the readers about things that some of them didn't know before they read the newsletter.
We will have a single free column and a couple of fixed columns that will get new content on every issue. For example, the column "Featured Migrated Application" will show a particular feature in a selected migrated system; the column "Missing in Gupta, found in .NET" will focus, in each issue, in a single feature in .NET that in our opinion will make Gupta developers very happy.
Hopefully we will provide useful information, if we don't, well... the trash bin is one click away.