eNewsletter Dos and Don'ts

eNewsletters serve three purposes:
--Reinforce your brand relationship with your magazine readers in an interactive medium
--Drive traffic to your website
--Generate incremental revenue for your group

If you are not accomplishing at least two of the three, you need to seriously consider the viability of your eNewsletter as it currently exists, whether it is worth it to refocus your editorial in a new direction, or whether you should abandon the medium and concentrate your efforts in another area.

Do:
Link all content somewhere, preferably to your own website (rule number 2).
Don’t:
Include articles that are self-contained in your eNewsletter unless they relate to the newsletter itself, as in, “This week’s XYZ eNews features a new content section on technology.”

Do:
Keep news items short—two-to-three sentences max—and offer readers a click here to read more or read more link that takes them to the entire story you have posted to your website.
Don’t
give them the entire story in the lead. Tease them and entice them to click thru.

Do:
Keep columns and commentary to the same length as articles and link them back to your posted column on your website.
Don’t
write multiple paragraphs under your byline as commentary without jumping the story to your website. Also, I recommend you do not lead your eNewsletter with your column. Since it is an eNewsletter, lead with news. Instead, run your column as another section after your first news content section. If you feel your column is strong enough to lead your eNewsletter and run in its entirety, we can explore the viability of taking it out of the eNewsletter, repackaging it as an opinion blog and giving it a dedicated mail date.

Do:
Link photos to the same article on your website to which the accompanying news item links.
Exception is your photo that accompanies your column or commentary. That should link to your email address.
Don’t
run photos that do not link anywhere. Readers expect them to be clickable.

Do:
Ask for feedback, prominently and often; especially in commentary.
Don’t
ignore the feedback when it comes. Include some of it in future issues as a follow-up on the original story. This generates additional click-thru activity and keeps the issue simmering.

Do:
Include a reader poll in every issue. Does not need to be more than 1 question long, but the format is always multiple choice (that includes “yes, no, maybe”). Why am I harping on this? Polls are a cheap and easy way to get into your readers heads, find out what they think, what bothers them, what they are doing. They also give you instant intelligence that you can use for editorial content development across all media platforms: online, print, in-person.
--Further, consider taking four weeks of poll results and creating a Pulse department in your print magazine that consolidates those results with a little analysis. This is a perfect example of using each medium to their best advantage and leveraging content across multiple platforms.
Don’t
think it is difficult to do. Your WebDev team will help you.

Do:
Study your article click thru patterns. Knowing which topics resonate with your readers helps you choose articles they will like to read.
Don’t
be afraid to jettison a topic that is not generating click thrus. You are doing your readers a favor.