Do you know the limitations of a newsletter?
No matter how beautiful the writing, newsletter publishing has two cardinal rules that must never be violated:
GET TO THE POINT! Forget about dramatic tension, building to a climax or surprise endings. Forget about cute. Forget about entertaining. Those things are incredible luxuries for the newsletter that has already achieved useful and informative.
Think about what you want from the newsletters that you read. Like all of us, you want them to be fast and informative. You don't want to have to pick the good stuff out of long lines of hype or sales talk, or cheesy humor.
MAKE IT SCANNABLE. Everyone is busy, so we all appreciate communication that enables us to quickly scan through something to find the stuff we really need or want.
Make sure your newsletter has lots of informative headlines and subheads and make sure they accurately reflect the info in the article. If you recycle your newsletter content from blog posts, or if you archive your newsletters as searchable content on your website (two great ideas) accurate headlines and subheads will really help optimize your pages for search engines, providing a free promotional boost and source of new subscribers.