In the last post I gave you 5 reasons to start building a newsletter. As a continuation of that post, now, I’m going to give you the basic points to make your newsletter a successful one:
Define your goals
The first and most important thing to do before you start the newsletter is setting up your goals for the newsletter. The rest flows from this. What do you want to achieve with your newsletter?
- Drive traffic to your web or blog?
- Create a community among your readers?
- Build a list to “sell” to?
- Create brand equity?
- Make money through advertising?
The content of the newsletter will vary depending on your goal. If you want to develop a community, you should provide some special and exclusive content to your subscribers, different from the content you publish in your blog, to make them fell special and showing them that been part of your newsletter gives them some extra value. I just want to increase the traffic of our blog, knowing that most of our readers don’t know about rss feeds, send a summary of your posts of the month.
Make clear what the newsletter is about
It is important to make very clear to the subscribers what is your newsletter about, in order to create the right expectations about what they are going to receive. If your newsletter is a summary of your blog posts, don’t be afraid and say it clearly. It is better to have less subscribers that now exactly the information they are going to get,. This is not a game of quantity of contacts, it is a game of quality of contacts.
Always use double opt-in subscription
It is very important that once you have started your newsletter, you use the double opt-in subscription technique to gather new subscribers. This way the subscribers have to confirm the subscription from an email sent to them, increasing the quality of the contacts of your list. Once again, you could get less contacts but higher quality contacts.
Add Value
The people wont stay subscribed to the newsletter if they don’t find any value or any need met. You can add this kind of value with exclusive content that you don’t publish in your blog, special offers and discounts only to your newsletter subscribers, and a lot of other ways depending on your audience.
Work your subject line
The subject line of your newsletter is the first thing that your subscribers will see, and in most of the cases what will make your subscriber open or not open your newsletter. We recommend:
- Not very long. Try to keep it between 20 and 50 characters.
- Never use all Caps. It will look spammy
- Give information about what the newsletter is about
- Never use multiple exclamation symbols !!!! or $$$
Track and analyze the results
Using a tool like Pixelnews will make very easy to get a lot of information about how your subscriber interact with your newsletters. Knowing who is opening your newsletter will allow you to test different subject lines with the subscribers that are not opening. Tracking the links in your newsletter will tell you which are the topics that interest the most to your readers and to which readers, helping you to segment your list, and sending more targeted and personalized messages the next time.
