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Secrets of an Email Newsletter Publisher

I've been publishing Web Digest For Marketers since April 1995. It was the very first email newsletter devoted to Internet marketing. Every week, I learn at least one new thing. Sometimes that new thing works forever; sometimes, it's only good for a year or two. Below are 10 strategies, tactics and tangible lasting observations I share with you on how to make an email newsletter successful. Enjoy.

1. Original Content Impacts List Vitality:

If I had only one strategy or tactic to use when building or maintaining an email newsletter list, it would be the use of original high-value content.

High-level content means people will pass the newsletter along (which is key for generating new subs). High-level content means the search engines will rank you higher because it isn't duplicative content.

If your content gets tired and uninspired, people will leave you in droves, your stature and reputation will decline and your advertisers will also be out the door.

Spend the money on a good, reliable staff. Too often newsletters pay little or nothing for good content. My Research Director Gayle Kerley has been with me for 10 years and Managing Editor Eileen Shulock has been with Web Digest for 11 years. They have a passion for this business and it's reflected in the content.

I've always spent far more money on content than on marketing, and it's worked out just fine for me.

2. Media Sales With a B2C Twist:

Web Digest For Marketers is advertiser-supported. These days, ad sales are quite robust because Internet marketing has obviously come into its own and it is more cost-effective than print options. But it wasn't always this way.

In the bad days after the dot com crash, it was very difficult to sell ads, especially when VC-backed advertisers were going belly up daily. We'd know when a company was gone when we'd see lots of bounced emails from that company after a transmission. Ads were not selling...at all.

I cut the price of the ads by 40% and put out a press release saying so. Nothing happened. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. I cut another 10%, still nothing.

I finally applied a retail selling concept to B2B ad sales. "Buy 1 ad, get 1 free.". Bingo. Turns out, everyone loves a bargain, whether it's a Wal-Mart shopper or a media buyer.

I still use the "buy one get one" deal to this day. Everyone loves a deal, and advertisers are very interested in knowing where their freebie is going to appear. Even in good times, give them something extra. It's a competitive edge that helps the advertiser's cost-per-lead numbers and builds a case for coming back to me again and again.

3. Sizing Up Co-Reg Partners:

Any savvy email newsletter publisher knows the importance of co-registration partnerships. The funny thing is, the most successful are often with publications that may well compete for the same advertisers.

When I see a new newsletter that has potential as a co-reg partner, I don't contact them right away. I subscribe to their newsletter and read it for a while first. I want to see how consistent they are.

• Is their content aimed high enough and a match for my content?
• Who else has a co-reg partnership with them?
• Where does their traffic come from?
• How many links point to their site?
• What type of sites point to them? Are they biz oppy? SMB sites? Enterprise sites?
• What advertisers do they have?

All the above give me clues to whether there may be a good match between my publication and theirs.

4. Long-Tail Clickthroughs:

You know you're doing something right when your advertisers tell you they are getting clickthroughs up to a year after the ad ran. How can this be?

After talking to many hundreds of subscribers to Web Digest at trade shows over the years, I find they often keep back issues in a folder in Outlook. Sometimes the folder is titled Web Digest, or WDFM, or Larry Chase. They use the subject line as a type of folder tab. So when they need PPC resources and tips, they go back to that folder and pull up that issue.

While they are in that issue they look at the ads, which are almost always offer-based. Since they're in a PPC issue (for example), and they see an ad for a white paper on "Best Practices for PPC", the chances are good they're going to respond to that ad, even many months after its release.

5. Your Reader is as Smart as You Are, Maybe Smarter:

You have to aim your content at a specific audience, or number of audiences. I assume many of my readers know as much about Internet marketing as I do, and in some cases, more. SEO people live in their own universe and eat, sleep and breathe SEO, the way PPC or email marketers eat, sleep and breathe their disciplines.

I regularly ask leaders in all categories if they're still getting value out of Web Digest. I figure if the top dogs still find it useful, everyone else will too.

BTW, I'm finding practitioners in one Internet marketing category are not necessarily up-to-the-minute on what's happening in other Internet marketing categories. I recently had a conversation with one sophisticated email marketer who expressed surprise when I showed her Universal SEO and what the impact might be on her business. Of course, SEO or PPC people aren't going to be so up-to-speed on the latest in email deliverability.

Web Digest is a way for one kind of Internet marketing specialist to stay up to speed on other aspects of Internet marketing.

6. On Subject Lines:

Why is it email newsletters repeat the name of the publication in the subject header when it's already in the From field?

Why is it that some newsletters put the date in the subject header when it's already in the time-stamp of the email itself?

Why is it that some newsletters tell you the issue number? Who cares what number issue it is? Readers what to know what's inside the email.

At best, you've got 35 characters (with spaces) to tell recipients what's inside and why they should open your email. If your newsletter is being read on a PDA, you've got a lot less space than 35 characters.

It seems like every newsletter has now found how attractive numbers and tips are, as in "9 SEO Tips". Generally, it's a good idea to theme your subject line, as described above in number 4.

I think of subject line words much like keywords at search engines. The words "optimization", "monetizing" and "ROI" will probably never go out of style.

7. Fresh Blood:

While my editorial staff has been with me for a decade or more, I know some topics are best handled by extremely specialized practitioners who are at the top of their class. It brings a different voice to the readership and different ideas as well.

In recent years I've asked Mike Grehan to guest edit on SEO matters. Amanda Watlington and Lee Odden have contributed very well-received pieces on social media and blogs. Andrew Goodman and Mona Elesseily help out on PPC matters. Nothing speaks louder than experience.

8. Picking Newsletter Topics:

If Web Digest For Marketers covered trade news, it would be easier to identify what to write about. But we don't cover the news of Internet marketing. When I started Web Digest in 1995, we basically covered marketing sites that had just come onto the Web. If we kept doing that, we would have gone out of business years ago.

So do we decide what to cover? Well, truthfully, I create an editorial calendar a couple months before the year begins and ask myself, "What do I want to know about next year?" A few years ago we moved to making each issue very topical and focused specifically on covering a single aspect of Internet marketing. So, what aspects get covered?

Aside from wanting to know certain things myself, I look at key indicators to help decide what issues should be covered/titled.

• Site Stats: At the home page of Web Digest there's an Internet Marketing Resource Center with 50 Internet marketing categories. I look at what categories get the most traffic as one indicator of what people want to know about.
• Search Words: Also at the home page of Web Digest is a search tool. I look closely at what people are searching for on my site. "Social media" and "social networking"are hot right now.
• Future Radar: I follow Forrester, eMarketer, Jupiter, Pew and others to see what trends are coming along. It's a no-brainer that mobile marketing is going to catch on like a house afire. When and how is the question, and how can it help my readership is my angle.

Content formulation has always been key to Web Digest. Originally we only reviewed marketing-oriented websites in 50 Internet marketing categories. We still do that, but we've also moved into tactics, tips, strategies and far-reaching topics like influencer marketing and thought leadership marketing.

9. Formatting:

One thing that hasn't changed since 1995 is our basic "content well". It's about as simple as it was when we started. Each "item" is roughly 150 words or less.

Some people like to "helicopter" around a newsletter. Some may read it top to bottom, while others may just read an item or two. Either way, the reader has control.

We try to keep paragraphs short at four lines or less (we're always improving on this). Some paragraphs may only be a sentence or two.

Short sentences and paragraphs break up the copy blocks and make it more inviting to read.

10. Content Repurposing:

The economics of email newsletter publishing are very different than traditional print newsletters and periodicals. News items have a certain shelf life. The content of Web Digest is more evergreen.

The reviews and tactics are poured into one of the 50 Internet marketing categories at the website. We don't post back issues because we've found people don't really thumb through back issues on a site so much. They will in their Outlook mail box, but no so much online.

So we use the same content, but packaged in a different way. The practice of repackaging our content on the website strays into the area of information architecture, which addresses how information gets found not only by the user, but by search engines as well.

I can tell you that the architecture of the Web Digest For Marketers website has over the years substantially helped bring traffic to the site, and that in turn has helped increase subscription rates.

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