Best way to publish a Newsletter online
Let’s assume you’ve decided to publish a newsletter online. Good choice. Lower production costs. And easy to distribute.
But how will you ensure your newsletter will actually get read?
One of the problems with online publishing (as opposed to physically placing a newsletter in the hands of your reader) is that you need to ensure that the recipient actually bothers to open the message containing your newsletter. It’s almost as if there is an extra hurdle that they must overcome first.
Today I’m going to look at things you can do to ensure that your electronic newsletter actually gets read and noticed:
- Resist creating a traditional Desktop Published newsletter which you simply then turn into a PDF and attach to an e-mail.The problem with this approach is that you are expecting your reader to do something additional in order to read your newsletter. You’re asking them to double-click and open your newsletter in Adobe PDF reader. And unfortunately this can act as a barrier. It is therefore better to ensure that once your prospective reader receives your e-mail they can read the newsletter instantly.
- Focus on the content, not the fancy layout. Hey I love great design, but the reality is that Newsletters can easily get caught in spam filters when being sent via e-mail.I therefore strongly recommend using a relatively plain newsletter layout. So for example, this newsletter is about as flashy as you should go. But for reference I frequently also send newsletters in boring old plain text as well, because the spam filters are much less likely to prevent them from being received and therefore read.
- Reduce the number of clicks. The fewer additional movements required in order to read the contents of your newsletter, the better. You’ll notice with this newsletter you start to read the story within the initial e-mail. With luck you are sufficiently hooked to click through to the actual content of this newsletter article on my blog. The principle that no one has to click more than once in order to read the content is therefore very important to the success of your newsletter.
Now maybe that you’ve arrived at this article not via my e-mail newsletter, but because you were searching the Internet and came across this online newsletter advice. This is in fact an important principle of publishing and electronic newsletter.
In effect, as a published, you want to have two bites of the cherry. The first is that you e-mail out your newsletter (just as I e-mailed out this newsletter article to those on my mailing list). The second is that some people will come across your article when searching for the solution to a problem, but this can only happen if in addition to e-mailing out your newsletter you posted online as I have done here.
Getting the format of your online newsletter right is likely to be just as important as its content. After all if no one is reading your e-mail and newsletter then there’s no point in publishing it in the first place. I’m Michael green and I have over 25 years experience in writing newsletter articles for all manner of businesses and organisations. You can share in my experience and use it to your own advantage by getting hold of a copy of my best selling How to Writing Newsletter Toolkit here.
- Want help producing your own newsletter? Get my How To Write A Newsletter Toolkit right here:
