Email Newsletter Tips, Tricks, and Stats, Part 2
The top three mission-critical steps when planning your email newsletter.
The top three mission-critical steps when planning your email newsletter.
Welcome back! When I work with clients who are publishing or looking to publish an email newsletter, a few common issues arise. As promised last month, I’ll address three of them today: setting goals for the email newsletter; creating an effective subscription page; and finding affordable editorial content.
Setting Goals for the Email Newsletter
To be effective, your email newsletter needs to have a focus and goal. The goal plays a large role in defining the content and format of your newsletter. Here’s a short list of the most common goals:
This list isn’t all-inclusive and the goals aren’t mutually exclusive. I recommend you choose one primary goal. You can add one to three secondary goals. After you decide on these goals, quantify them whenever possible. This frequently involves a guesstimate. That’s fine. Figure out what’s realistic and go with that. You can always adjust up if your estimate is low. If your estimate is high, you may want to revamp your approach.
Creating an Effective Subscription Page
Getting people to subscribe to your email newsletter is critical. If you request too much information on the subscription page or the newsletter description is weak, you’ll lose prospects. Here are a few tips to optimize list growth:
Finding Affordable Editorial Content
Many sources of syndicated articles are available in exchange for attribution. Although these are cost-effective (many are free), finding good quality articles highly targeted to your audience is often difficult. There are many other ways to get affordable editorial content. Here’s what I recommend to clients:
Does all this take time to accomplish? Yes. But finding good syndicated articles takes time as well. You’ll produce a higher quality email newsletter using these methods. Be organized and plan each issue ahead, with enough time to write and edit articles.
Thanks to everyone who emailed me after my last column, especially those who told me what they’d like to see covered in the future. Far and away, your top request was choosing an email vendor. Though I won’t talk about specific vendors, I will provide an overview of different features offered, discuss how to determine what you really need and what you can live without, provide some online resources to assist you, and give you some key questions to ask.
I’ll be in San Francisco later this month at ClickZ Email Strategies. If you’re attending, email me and let’s meet for coffee.
Until then,
Jeanne