Email Newsletter Best Practices

1. Identify the Audiences Within Your Audience: Email newsletters are typically pretty focused publications, and therefore the subscribers will have many characteristics in common. Still, it's important to realize your audience is probably not all look-alikes, like so many cut-out paper dolls.

Addressing specific audience segments can engage different parts of your list. The people who click on email-marketing reviews and ads are typically different from those reacting to PPC or SEM content.

Over the years, I've found the more specific I get with addressing audience segments, the better. What I've also noticed is that many subscribers who belong to one segment of my audience also belong to other segments.

One week, a person at a firm may be responsible for managing PPC campaigns. The following week, that person is up to his or her eyeballs in email deliverability.

2. Look at Your Newsletter Without Graphics: Why? Because it's probably how more than half of your subscribers see it. Most email apps and inbox providers now default to graphics switched off. I know very few people who go out of their way to change those defaults so they can see your lovely GIFs and JPEGs, and those of your advertisers (if you have them).

In fact, sometimes people who can see graphics will actually turn them off in order to print out newsletters. They don't want to waste the toner.

Unless your newsletter is about photography, fashion or architectural drawings, people just want to glean the information from you. That's OK, since that is what you are publishing for anyway.

3. Identify your Editorial Niche: The toughest problem I see companies have is deciding what content to put in their newsletters. Well, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. What you want to see in a newsletter as a reader is often what you want to make available as a publisher.

I started Web Digest for Marketers because I needed it myself. As an Internet marketing pioneer in 1995, I had to be able to speak about what was happening on the Internet marketing scene. What's out there? What's worth emulating? What new trends are emerging? This was the genesis of my newsletter.

I read each newsletter at least three times. I read it for editorial purposes, as well as for the content itself.

I suggest you identify what editorial niche in your marketplace is underserved, or not being served at all, and see if you can comfortably fill the void.

If you aren't jazzed by each issue of your newsletter, it's very likely that your readers won't be, either.

4. Pay Attention to Details: Managing Editor Eileen Shulock and I are very old school about typos and grammar. Yes, we take creative license sometimes. Yes, the occasional typo gets published. I won't like it. But we do go out of our way to keep the copy clean.

It seems more acceptable these days to have typos and looser-fitting language, a sort of shorthand. But I do feel it reflects on the writers and editors to make the prose as tight as possible.

Keeping it tight telegraphs to the readers and advertisers that details matter. You can think of it as packaging. Sure, the car will run just as well if the paint job has bubbles in it. But psychologically, it won't feel as good.

Details go beyond copy, of course, especially in an email newsletter. How does the newsletter render in different browsers, email readers and on BlackBerry devices? Yes, it can get tedious. But how you appear is, after all, an expression of you and your firm. It's worth the work. Spend the time and money on it.

5. Be Concise: When I started Web Digest in 1995, the editorial tone was a lot more "schmoozy", even though the reviews were even then only about 150 words each.

Now that there are too many informational resources, we tend to get right down to business. Yes, we use pithy little asides to indicate our feelings and attitudes. But for the most part, we stick to serving up lots of red-meat content.

6. Create a Long-Tail Newsletter: As we move forward in time, I notice the clickthrough tail getting longer and longer, meaning our newsletters get read and clicked on for a longer time after they are published.

You want your clickthrough tail to get longer, too. Here are a few ways you can make this happen:

1. Create content that's evergreen. People are more apt to hold onto how-to information and resource-rich newsletters.
    
2. Look at subject lines like tab folders. People save Web Digest issues in their WDFM folders or Larry Chase folders and use the subject lines as a type of filing marker. Each issue's subject line is clearly labeled as being about PPC, or SEO, or advanced email marketing or Web metrics for social media. This on-the-fly filing system that people use helps them to retrieve the content on demand. Thus, both editorial and ads get clickthroughs far into the future.
    
3. Tip: If you advertise in long-tail newsletters, leave your landing pages up for a very long time. The people who save back issues and click on ads and editorial are obviously a highly engaged segment of the audience.

7. Know When to Make Changes: Certain things about Web Digest are the very same as they were in 1995. The editorial units are still about 150 words long, for example. But other aspects needed to be freshened up. Here are a few things I've changed over the years:

1. We now concentrate on special-focus issues. Time was when every issue of Web Digest was simply covering the best new marketing sites to hit the Web. This was a winning formula for many years. But we changed it in order to reflect changing times.
   
   Since the millennium, each issue drills down into a single slice of the Internet marketing pie. Both advertisers and readers are attracted to this tighter focus.
    


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2. We've also evolved the newsletter's look and feel. Today's Web Digest looks somewhat like the original, except it's in HTML format now (with graphics, special fonts and colors), and has two columns instead of one. I've thought of changing it to three columns, but I feel it looks too busy. I prefer the simpler look.
   
   Direct marketers will tell you that changing a page will increase response rates. There is truth to this. But changing often just for the sake of change isn't a great idea.
   
   That said, you do want the look and feel to be current. You don't want someone to look at your newsletter or site and say, "Oh, how very 1999."

8. Repurpose Newsletter Content: You've gone to the effort and expense to create content; you might as well get as much legitimate mileage out of it as possible.

Naturally, you want to put your email newsletter content on your site in order to draw SEO traffic and inbound links. But be careful about reusing it too many times. If you use the content in your blog and in addition feature it elsewhere on your site in its original format (for example, as back issues of your newsletters), you might well be penalized for content duplication by the search engines.

Being penalized for content duplication doesn't necessarily mean you're thrown out of the search engine index. It could simply mean you appear further down in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

9. Focus on Deliverability: We could devote a whole issue to this. Wait a minute: We do! :) But for purposes of this discussion, let's nail some of the critical points:

1. Repeatedly check your SPF (sender policy framework) records and reputation of the IP address you use to send your newsletter out. If your newsletter is sent from an email service bureau, you most definitely want to see if you are sending from a shared IP address or a dedicated one. If you share it with other clients of your email service bureau, you want to get your own IP address. Any infractions by these other clients can hurt your deliverability.
    
2. Keep up with the latest in deliverability techniques and development. Remember I talked about how things can get tedious earlier? Well, studying the ways to keep your newsletter out of an ISP's bulk filter is tedium squared, but absolutely necessary.

If your eyeballs glaze over when thinking about this critical aspect of getting your newsletter delivered, then hire an expert. You must concentrate on writing copy that does not contain words or formatting that looks suspicious, for example, but other issues such as your HTML coding, the quality of the mailing list you email your messages to and your manner of dealing with complaints affect deliverability as well. You can find easy-to-understand advice on these topics here: www.wdfm.com

10. What's Your Favorite Newsletter? That's not a rhetorical question. I really want to know what you're reading. I'm fascinated by what other newsletters people read in addition to my own.

In addition to reading virtually all email newsletters on Internet marketing, I like Morningstar's email newsletter because it artfully blends high-value editorial content with pitches for signing up for some of the paid services.

I swore I wouldn't sign up for paid content, but I wound up doing it anyway. The way they got me was classic DM. I really wanted the premium stuff badly. I waited for a special deal, and sure enough, one came along. They got me!

Every so often, they publish an article that I couldn't access without a paid membership, but I couldn't get upset with them because they had already delivered such high value to me for no cost. Brilliant.

11. Relevance is King: Don't tell my editors and writers, but the ads in Web Digest for Marketers get clicked on every bit as often as the editorial does, and often many more times. Why? Because the offers in those ads are especially relevant to my readers.

12. Don't Be Shy: Ask for the sale. Have you ever just wanted to buy something quickly, and the email or Web interface did everything to divert you from getting it done? We've all been there.

Many times people just want to cut to the chase and get onto the next thing. Make it easy for them to do so. I seriously doubt you'll alienate those who aren't ready at that point on the page. They can always decline to click just then.

I once worked on a very long sales letter in which we had over 10 places where the reader could click. The highest clickthroughs were the one at the very top and the one at the very bottom, but virtually all the links in the middle were clicked on at least a few times. Different strokes for different folks.