Marketing & CommunicationsNon-Profit
E-newsletters: The right way
Monday, June 28, 2010
Filed under Marketing & Communications, Non-Profit
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Even in this age of social media and RSS feeds, e-newsletters are still a great way to connect with your audience. But are you maximizing this potential? Here are some tips for doing so…
Make it concise
Don’t include entire articles in your e-newsletter. Instead, include only:
- The article title
- A short summary of the article, along with an image if desired
- A link to the full article, located on your website
Doing this adds three benefits:
- It allows the e-newsletter to be scanned quickly, making it more likely to be read
- On any given day, your recipients probably received a dozen other emails asking to be read. Make yours worth their while.
- It allows you to track which articles your audience is reading
- Once your articles are located on your website, you can track visits to them just like any other page through stats packages like Google Analytics. In fact, many e-marketing tools, such as Campaign Monitor, have built-in tracking services, making this extra simple. Find out which topics your audience prefers reading about, and provide more of that content.
- It allows you to reuse e-newsletter content on your website without duplication
- This way, you can still make edits to the content if necessary, even after you’ve already sent out the newsletter. Your readers are always seeing the most recent version.
Make it interactive
We all know how important social media is these days, so why not incorporate social media into your e-newsletters?
Now that the full articles are located on your website, your readers can share those links through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Through your CMS, you can also turn on commenting in each article - blog-style - thus enabling two-way communication with your audience. If your readers have something to say about your content, now they have somewhere to say it.
This comes with a caveat, of course: That you take part in the discussion. Allowing your readers to comment on articles but then not responding is probably worse than not allowing comments at all, so make sure someone in your organization is responsible for monitoring the discussion.
Your audience wants to know that they’re being heard, so listen to them. You may just get some helpful feedback!
