Promote more effectively through your newsletter
Okay, tempting as it is for me, I’m not going to dwell on principles, abstract concepts or the meta stuff about effective promotion — you know the basics. If you don’t, go learn them!
The only fundamental I will quickly reiterate is this: please make sure your mailing list is entirely permission-based. Not only is it unethical, crass and downright nasty to be spamming the inboxes of people who didn’t ask you to do so, it’s also ineffective marketing (read the book on it if you don’t believe me). Oh, and we’ll kick you off our publisher network if we find out you’re blanket mailing non-permission-based lists.
Right, formalities addressed, here are five very practical tips to help boost your take-up of newsletter content.
1. Split test
I put this point first because all of the following points are subject to this one: if the statistics are telling you something different to what I’m telling you, listen to the statistics!
Split your mailing list in half, completely arbitrarily. Send an ‘a’ version of your newsletter to one half of the list; then change one variable and send this ‘b’ version to the other half. Track the reports/traffic analytics and see if the change you made had any significant effect. Adopt the newsletter version that works better as your ‘a’ version and then repeat the process next time with a different variable. This is simple evolutionary optimisation.
It’s important that you only change one variable at a time so that you can be confident in what it was that made the difference. If your ‘a’ version contains 20 articles each with large images and your ‘b’ version contains 3 articles with no images, you won’t know if it was the length or the use of images that primarily contributed to a difference in conversion rate. Each of the following points is an example of a variable that you can change, split test and then either adopt or discard.
2. Use directive in your calls to action and links
Like I just did there, see? Using directive means starting your link/call to action with a verb instruction: ‘get’, ‘watch’, ‘read’, ‘learn’, ‘use’.
You might think it doesn’t suit the friendly/chatty/informal/light touch tone of your newsletter to rephrase ‘Phil Collins, a gorilla and a drumkit? Surely it’ll never work!’ to ‘watch the new Cadbury’s advert that features a drumming gorilla’ but the truth is it’s just a clearer way of writing that’s easier for your readers to understand — and links using directive invariably get more click-through.
3. Pick action shots for video images
If you use images in your newsletter and are talking about a video or clip, try and pick a screenshot/still that shows some action in progress: an image of a car halfway through a spin will get more clicks than one of its hood (however pretty a car it is); an image of a guy walking down the road is more interesting than one of the front of his house. The rule of thumb is: the more movement implied in the image, the better. Also, people like looking at people. Get a person in there if you can.
4. Don’t waste ‘above the fold’ on self-aggrandisement
You might have a really awesome logo. You might have the logo that really does justify all those requests to ‘just make it a bit bigger’. You might have made the most shiny, gradiented, drop-shadowed, rounded-cornered and pastelly header banner the world has ever seen. Even if all this is true of you, you still need to get your header out of the way and let people see what they signed up for: your content!
(Remember, ‘above the fold’ in the crowded world of Outlook etc is generally a far smaller space than it is in a browser).
Try this: see how close you can put your first content headline to the top of the newsletter design before you start wincing and worrying that you’re compromising your ‘branding’. Now move it a bit higher, perhaps even a bit higher still… can I see the headline clearly in my Mail yet? The whole thing? Is it more prominent than your company logo? Good! Publish, send…
5. Tell the story your readers want to hear
Don’t settle for copy-pasting the press release schlock. Don’t be vague or hedge your bets with promises of ‘fun stuff’. Find the specific hook for your readership and articulate it to them simply. Take the Cadbury’s example again: if you’re running a mailing list for drummers, mention the drumming (’watch this clip of a drumming gorilla: does he skip a beat in the third bar?’). If it’s a list for advertisers, flag up the campaign strategy; for costume-makers, speculate about the hairy realism; for bored teenagers, promise the ‘LOL WTF?’ factor… you get the idea.
Tags: email marketing, Mailing Lists