Newsletters

I enjoy putting together newsletters and I’m proud of my accomplishments in this realm:

At the Bata Shoe Museum, I transitioned the members’ newsletter from a print publication to a digital one, saving the organization time and money.
At the Royal Ontario Museum, I led the adoption of the 2014 Canadian Anti-SPAM Legislation through the Museum.

Tips

Newsletters can be a goldmine for your organization. Here’s an audience who has specifically said that they want to hear from you. And through the newsletter, you can gradually move them along the funnel.

Plan

But you can’t just throw information at them once in a while. Develop a content calendar and work back in time from the dates of your organization’s important events to schedule your messages. You’ll probably want to let subscribers know of upcoming events more than once: not everyone is going to read every newsletter. Your first message about an event might just be a “save the date”.

Monitor

Monitor open and clickthrough rates to determine what’s of most interest to your audience. Is the open rate better if you send on a Tuesday rather than a Sunday? Do they click on images more, or text links? Are people interested in event announcements, or stories? If you can, set up tracking in Google Analytics so you can see how many customer journeys which start from the newsletter end up converting. Then tweak your content towards what works.

Images

Here also, powerful images will do much go the heavy lifting for you. Remember to add the alt text for each image.

Gallery-Newsletters-Thumbs

I designed a template for our newsletters based on one of the responsive templates from our ecommunications service provider. I wanted something that was clean, light and modern, and a design that stayed in the background so our images could take centre stage.

This newsletter is short and sweet, with one main message supported by an eye-catching image. It’s nice when you can do these because not only is it an easier read for your subscribers, but it’s also easier for you to gauge interest in this particular topic.

This newsletter is themed to one exhibition and the events related to it. It can be difficult to have all activities sufficiently confirmed to be announced to the public, when they may not happen for several months. This is another good reason to have a multi-channel workback schedule: you can let the events team know well in advance when you’ll need information from them.

This is an earlier version of the Museum’s monthly newsletter, before mobile-responsive templates became common. At that time, I often wished there was a function that would allow subscribers to share any single article to their own social networks. No-one’s going to share a whole newsletter, with so many different events.

Below are full-length versions of two of the newsletters above. Click to enlarge. Are you up for a long scroll?

You’re probably thinking that this newsletter is too long. I agree. When your newsletter has too much content for a quick scroll, it’s time to look at segmenting your audience–unless your open and clickthrough rates are really good!