Newsletter Audience Research: What to Do Before You Write a Single Line

Studying competitors gives you topics and formats. But that's a view from the other side of the counter. You need the view from the person who actually reads. That's the real starting point for newsletter audience research.

Personal contact gives you material you won't find anywhere else

Are you a marketer inside a company? Go spend a day or two in the sales department. Sit on the phone with a manager. Listen to real conversations.

Find a reason to visit a client's office.

I know an owner of a sex shop who from time to time delivers orders himself, as a courier. This way he sees real people with their requests. He can exchange a few words about what they actually need. If the owner of the business doesn't think this is beneath him, a marketer definitely has no excuse to stay in the office.

On forums, read threads where people are solving problems. How they phrase the question. What level of answer they get.

At conferences, listen to the questions from the audience more closely than the talks themselves. The question shows what people actually care about.

Newsletter Audience Research: The Digital Methods

LinkedIn and other social platforms are forum threads with names and job titles attached to every comment. You can see who is asking. Search queries show a person's problem in their own words, with nothing filtered out.

Tools like SparkToro show what podcasts and publications your target audience actually follows. You can search by job title, by keyword, or directly by a competitor's website.

An AI tool can go through a large batch of data and pull out the most repeated topics and questions. Run a hundred or two hundred comments or reviews through it, get a list back in minutes.

With that analysis in hand, you pick the topic.

What to do with this

This costs no money. It costs time and the willingness to step outside your own feed. Collect five to seven real questions from clients before you sit down to write the concept. Find them on a forum. In the comments under a competitor's post. In a conversation with a sales manager. Only after that does it make sense to move to tone, topics, issue format, and who exactly is speaking to the subscriber.

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