Marketing Toolkit

A periodic newsletter that focuses on transit news can be an effective way of communicating with gatekeepers, decision-makers, and riders who have signed up for alerts. Consider who your audience is, what information would be important or interesting to them, and what you want to communicate. Messages useful to gatekeepers and decision-makers may be different from messages useful to riders. 

While a printed newsletter may be useful in some cases, a more cost-effective method may be using email newsletters. The old way of doing this usually meant creating a newsletter intended for print, then emailing a PDF file of it. This can be problematic because the PDF attachment may be large and some email systems may reject it, or some people may not have the software necessary to read the attachment (this is especially problematic if you send something like a Microsoft Word file instead of a PDF). 



On the other hand, sending a simple email containing text with no images may not get much attention from the people receiving it, will not reinforce your brand, and will likely be ignored.

Email Newsletter Platforms

A solution to this is to use an email newsletter platform or email marketing platform. There are many platforms available, but two popular ones are MailChimp or Constant Contact. Search for “email newsletter” and you’ll find lots of options.



These systems include pre-made templates that allow you to send emails that appear in the recipient’s inbox as visually-pleasing, professional-looking newsletters. These newsletters can include photos and graphics, and may contain complete stories or intros to stories with links to read the full stories. 

You can, and should, customize the templates to match your branding, using your logo and colors, changing typestyles, etc. 

You can organize multiple mailing lists in these platforms so that each user is subscribed to a particular newsletter. Be sure to include a way for people to sign up for newsletters at the bottom of each newsletter email (this functionality is usually built into these email platforms), and provide a link on your website for users to sign up for newsletters. 

Printed Newsletters