As your company grows, you need a way to keep your team up to date on what's happening. Internal company newsletters are a great way to do this. They can be used to share company updates, new product launches, and more.
For a while, sending a simple email using Gmail (or your email provider of choice) was the best way to send an internal company newsletter. But as your company grows, you'll quickly hit the limits of what a basic email client can do.
Why Gmail doesn't scale
What works for a 10-person startup falls apart at 50, 100, or 500 employees:
- No subscriber management. You're manually updating distribution lists, hoping someone remembers to add new hires and remove departing employees. People slip through the cracks. (Buttondown's teams feature handles this for you.)
- No archive. New employees have no way to catch up on company history. That important announcement from six months ago? Good luck finding it in someone's inbox. (See how archives solve this.)
- No analytics. You have no idea if people are actually reading your updates. Are employees engaged, or is your newsletter going straight to the trash? (We've got analytics for that.)
- No scheduling. Want to send at 9am local time for each office? You're waking up early or staying up late.
- No formatting control. Gmail's editor is fine for quick notes, but try building a consistent, branded template and you'll be fighting with copy-paste formatting issues forever.
Why legacy intranet tools don't work either
Enterprise solutions like SharePoint or Confluence solve some problems but create new ones:
- Low engagement. Employees have to go somewhere to read updates. Most won't. Email meets people where they already are.
- Clunky authoring. Writing in enterprise wiki tools feels like filling out a form, not crafting a message. The friction kills consistency.
- Overkill complexity. You don't need a full knowledge management system. You need to send a weekly email that people actually read.
- IT overhead. Someone has to maintain it, configure permissions, and train new employees. That's time and money you could spend elsewhere.
What you actually need
A better solution handles:
- Subscriber management that syncs with your team, so the right people get the right updates automatically. Buttondown's teams and collaborators feature lets you manage permissions so the right people can send and the right people can read.
- Archiving and permissioning so new hires can read through company history and sensitive updates stay internal. Our archives give your team a searchable history of every update you've ever sent.
- Analytics so you know what's landing and what's being ignored. Track opens, clicks, and engagement without the creepy surveillance—and if you'd rather not track anything at all, that's fine too. We care about privacy.
- A writing experience that makes it easy to send consistent, well-formatted updates without fighting your tools.
If you're already sending investor updates or running a SaaS company, you might already be familiar with how Buttondown handles these problems. Internal newsletters work the same way—just pointed at your team instead of your customers.