Web Design
What makes an effective e-newsletter?
Maintaining an e-newsletter is a fast and inexpensive way to regularly communicate with your target audience. If you throw in a strategic structure and content-generating tools, managing an e-newsletter can be a game changer. The following are some key tips for maximizing the impact of an e-newsletter.
- Newsletter Format – Unless a newsletter edition is just one short little article or promotion, we're huge proponents of sending out well-written subject lines and only a couple of sentences to grab a reader's attention. That way the newsletter is clean, succinct, and enticing. If the reader likes what they see, they can click on the article to launch a full web page to read the entire content. From there, you can better track users' behavior through regular web analytics to see where they go and infer what they might want to know. Our most proactive clients send out multiple articles per newsletter edition, and in that situation, we've found it extremely effective to setup “mini-websites” that represent each newsletter edition. These mini-sites have a homepage for each edition as well as a separate navigation system from your main website. Each link in the newsletter navigation takes users to their respective articles in that particular newsletter edition, and the edition's homepage only displays the titles of the articles and the first couple of sentences for each. The homepage is what we copy into a template and send out via email. In fact, you've most likely already seen how it works if you're reading this right now. We encourage you to take some time to review the format and let us know what you think.
- Newsletter Frequency – While we haven't always done a very good job of this ourselves, we still recommend sending out a newsletter edition at least once per quarter. In the time between editions, be strategic about the behavior you want to inspire, and accumulate four to six articles that make up a well thought out “theme”. Between full-fledge newsletter editions, we also encourage clients to send out one or two promotions or quick “info bits” to stay connected to your audience. The key here is to balance a fine line between staying in front of your customer, but not bombarding them with so many emails as to be perceived as spam. We encourage each client to use their best judgment regarding the frequency of communication as every industry is different in terms of professional correspondence.
- Newsletter Promotion – The key to a successful newsletter is growing the subscription base over time, and there is almost an unlimited amount of ways to do that if you're being creative. Offering promotions and discounts contingent on subscribing can be a powerful tool to growing your list, as is sending out subscription links in all client communication including email signatures, invoices, letters, etc. If you're business is based on point of sale, developing a tasteful process for encouraging customers to signup can also be effective. Before sending out every newsletter edition, develop a process where all employees update their contact database and import that into the subscription database. It is a perfectly acceptable practice to sign up an existing business contact to your newsletter as long as you give them ample ways to unsubscribe.
- Newsletter Quality – This is an important one to consider as the quality of your brand/image is more critical the more proactive you are at publicizing it. In fact, aggressively marketing your brand can potentially do more harm than good if the quality of your communication doesn't align with the expectations of your target audience. This concept is important for your main website as well. If you're going to have an internet presence and/or spend the time proactively marketing your organization, you're better off doing it in a high-quality, modern fashion. While there is an up-front cost for doing that, the opportunity cost for not doing it is always going to be more.
- Newsletter Content & Guidelines – Don't share your readers' email addresses with anyone, and make it clear to them that you never will. Include that language in your privacy policy and terms of use pages as well as when they sign up and when they unsubscribe. Always give users a way to unsubscribe even if that isn't what you ultimately want to happen. Consider the quality and relevance of the content from your readers' shoes. While the purpose of the newsletter is to market your organization, the most effective way to do that is by educating readers in a way that helps them first and foremost. If you do that effectively, the effort will be well worth it.
- Newsletter Technology – There are a couple of ways to manage a newsletter with the primary options being managed internally vs. having a third party help in some way. If you manage it internally, that's a good way to go, but we highly encourage clients at least use a third-party distribution system. Any reputable distribution company will include the very critical “subscribe” & “unsubscribe” features, but they'll also protect you from getting blacklisted with various internet service providers (ISPs). Most ISPs don't like seeing mass emails go across their servers as that is a common practice by unscrupulous spammers. So, these third party tools will batch emails and send them in intervals such that ISPs don't become alarmed. Some distribution companies even include email templates you can use, but before selecting one of those, you should make sure the quality and likeness of the design represents the quality of perception you want from your readers.
- CyberSense's Newsletter Solution – For those interested in how we're managing our own newsletter and helping others do the same, we'd like to share a new technology that we've recently implemented that makes creating a newsletter easier than ever. Interestingly enough, the solution is combined with blog software. Here's how it works: Since a blog is the best tool on the market for non-technical users to generate web content, we've created a blog plug-in feature that allows users to select specific blog articles that they want to make into a newsletter edition. Once the articles are selected and saved, they automatically create a newsletter edition via the mini-site concept that we described earlier in this article. Just by selecting the articles within the blog, the newsletter homepage is populated with the titles and first couple of sentences while the interior of the mini-site contains the full articles selected. In addition to creating the mini-site, a second version of the homepage is generated in an email template form so organizations can easily send that out for their readers to link back to the newsletter edition from their email. The ultimate benefit to using this system is that clients have one place, the blog, where they can easily create all their valuable content as non-technical administrators, and they can pick and choose as to whether articles show up just in the blog or if they are better suited to be sent out as part of a newsletter edition. If you're interested in learning more, please contact us for a detailed description.
