How to Run a Newsletter Campaign

From Web Smart Newsletter: Managing a Newsletter Campaign
By Chris Butler, April 2009

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Managing a Newsletter Campaign

1.	Newsletter Campaigns
»	Running Your Campaign
3.	Measuring Performance
4.	Measuring SEO

You Must Have a Sign-Up Call to Action

Our newsletter is our primary marketing tool, so we want to make sure that we're promoting it as much as possible on our website. That's why you'll find a newsletter sign-up widget at the top of the sidebar on just about every page. As part of a recent series of adjustments to our website's calls to action, we tweaked the newsletter widget to make it clearer and easier to use. Before, users clicking "subscribe" were taken to a new page; now, the form appears within the widget itself (I've illustrated this with an animated image to the left). We also changed the headline from "WebSmart Newsletter" to "Sign Up: Our Newsletter." We felt that leading with the user's intended action rather than our editorial title made the call to action much easier to quickly understand and act upon. Minor adjustments like that can actually make a significant difference. As you'll soon see, the changes we made in January had immediate positive effects.

Track Your Newsletter Subscribers

When our subscribers receive our newsletter email, they must click a link within it to actually read the full article on our website. We consider the email version simply a method of alerting our subscribers that the content is available, not a delivery method for the entire newsletter. By clicking that link, the user activates our website's newsletter tracking module, which will then record each page the user visits during this session, along with the time and duration of their activity. Besides telling us how many subscribers actually clicked through to read the entire newsletter, the tracker data really helps us to evaluate which pages of the newsletter were more engaging to our readers, as well as what other content they interacted with during their visit.

In the screenshot below, you can see some of the tracking data logged by a reader of our last newsletter (I've blurred out her email address, but left the numeric ID our system assigns visible). You can see that this person landed on the first page, "How to Write a Newsletter," and quickly clicked to the third and fourth pages. After spending less than one minute among them, though, she clicked back to the first page and spent over ten minutes reading it, then even more time on the second page, which was really the meat of the newsletter. I can also see that she clicked the link I provided to an older newsletter, "Tags to the World," on the fourth page. Seeing this level of detail helps me to know a few things: (1) the side navigation menu of the newsletter and the titles of the lower pages were compelling to this reader, which is a good thing, and kept her from bouncing from the page. (2) Having been enticed by the concepts in those lower pages after skimming through them, this reader was willing to spend a much longer amount of time on the second page, where I really laid out my main argument. Finally, (3) I'm not showing this in the screenshot, but this reader went on to view numerous other pages on the site, including previous newsletters about designing for the web, planning for a web development project, and how to do search engine optimization. This reader may turn out to be a well informed client-to-be!

But because many readers either check the website itself to see if new content has been added or subscribe to our newsletter using RSS, the tracker numbers are not the only data that we should evaluate in order to measure how well our newsletters, either individually or as a program, are doing. We have much more information available that will help to get the big picture... next >

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Comments

Ira	April 29, 2009 7:31 PM Why does the tracker data end earlier than the other three metrics?
Chris Butler	April 30, 2009 7:41 AM Ira, Good question- I probably should have mentioned this in my explanation of the graph. We send out our newsletters at the end of every month (we sent out our April newsletter yesterday). So, at the time when I wrote April's newsletter, we had no tracking data for April. Now that we've sent out the newsletter, though, the tracking data is coming in. Chris
Peter Bryant	April 30, 2009 9:15 AM Chris, Thanks for sharing all this data. Do you have a longer range of data for your newsletter tracking? I'm interested in speculating the reasons the numbers vary so widely.
Alex	April 30, 2009 11:35 AM Last month you wrote a bit about the time it could/should take to write. How much time do you spend reviewing your tracking, analytics and SEO for your newsletters?
Chris Butler	April 30, 2009 11:55 AM Alex, It varies depending upon what I'm looking for in particular. I almost always keep our CMS tracking report open in a tab of my browser, so I can quickly check it after I receive a tracker alert via email. I also keep Google Analytics open and tend to spend about 15 minutes a day reviewing the data in general every day. If I were to combine the amount of time I spent analyzing data related to a newsletter after I send it out, which would include looking at the tracker, Google Analytics, our Google tracking data, and making any adjustments for SEO, it would probably amount to 2-3 hours per newsletter. Hope that answers your question, Chris
Ted	April 30, 2009 5:56 PM Is it really that impressive that your newsletter content pages represent 8 out of your top 20 pages? Makes sense to me since they are probably the most often updated kind of content- every month, right- and are pretty long?
Chris Butler	April 30, 2009 11:27 PM They are in the top 20 because their meta titles are corresponding well to keywords and phrases that are being searched often. Also, the newsletters are added once a month, but we update our blog much more frequently- some months as often as once a day! What you can't see in the screenshot I pulled from our Google Analytics account is that it also shows that 2,224 pages were viewed a total of 46,755 times on our site this month. Of those 2,224 pages, the top 20 are the ones listed in the screenshot. Of those 20, 8 are related to our newsletter. From that perspective, it is a significant statistic. What does make sense, in general, is that the content we value most highly, and create most carefully and strategically, would be so often among the top pages. That's a SEO pay-off of our effort, though, which, in my opinion, is impressive!
Chris Butler	May 1, 2009 3:20 PM @Peter Bryant, I took a bit longer to reply to your question because I wanted to actually put together a blog post looking at two year's worth of tracking data from our newsletter campaign to see if there are trends in the relationship between the day of the week, time of day, and the subject of the newsletter itself that would explain the tracking rate. Hope that it's what you had in mind. Feel free to comment on it, or back here, with any insight.
Andrew	May 1, 2009 7:00 PM Once again, so much to take in! You guys always have the neatest graphs. How do you make them?
Alex	May 1, 2009 7:06 PM What do you do with the email addresses that you're tracking? Do you have a privacy policy on your newsletter?
Ryan Brown	May 1, 2009 7:32 PM This is a great follow-up to last month's piece about newsletter writing, though I guess it could have just as easily been about writing- in general. Will you be doing more about marketing rather than web development? How do you all divvy up your company resources between development, design and marketing? Are you guys heading more in the marketing direction- if so, that's smart. It's the future of this industry. If you can't design and do marketing, you won't last.
Chris Butler	May 4, 2009 9:45 AM @Andrew, Thanks! Most of the time, if I know I need to plot something out in a graph, I'll draw it first and then create the final image using Photoshop. I posted some graphs and the original drawings on my blog last month after a commenter asked a similar question. @Alex asked if I run some kind of script to collect and visualize this data. Sadly, my approach is much more old-fashioned and less sophisticated. I manually collect the data I'm looking for, sketch it out on paper, then create a graph using Photoshop, but there's no automated script or software plotting it out for me. @Alex, We don't have a privacy policy on our newsletter, but we do nothing other than send them to our subscribers. We don't share the list with anyone, under any circumstances. We consider the tracking we do to be well within reasonable bounds since our readers willingly provide that information to us and the only usage we track is their use of our site. Internet privacy is something I care a lot about, so I'm definitely on-guard to make sure we don't do anything contrary to those values. @Ryan Brown, Our next newsletters will definitely be about marketing, as are most of them. Specifically, we're planning newsletters on practical social media use, how to do webinars, and optimizing your website with calls to action. Each of these newsletters deal with marketing, but from the perspective of a web development firm. We partner with many marketing-focused agencies, and don't want to compromise that relationship. However, we do provide expertise as it pertains to marketing on the web. So, no, we're not heading in an entirely new direction. We're a web development firm that wants to make sure that the sites we build achieve the business objectives planned for them- including marketing.
Ted	May 4, 2009 11:48 AM @Chris Butler, yes, but you are tracking people. Isn't it true that the Google Analytics API restricts this kind of thing because of the very privacy issues that you claim to care about?
Chris Butler	May 4, 2009 6:45 PM Ted, You've got a fair question here. Google doesn't want their API being used to track individuals because all of that data goes through their system, so any sticky privacy issues around the practice of tracking user behavior and tying it to individual IP addresses or email addresses would become their problem too. In our case, we are simply tracking our newsletter subscribers' behavior on our site using a proprietary tracking tool that keeps the data on our private server. We would not even have those email addresses if the users did not willingly subscribe to our newsletter. The data we collect is only relevant to our site and never leaves our server, so it wouldn't present any real value to anyone other than us. Furthermore, any user that is concerned about this still can avoid it two ways: (1) by not clicking the 'read more' link in the newsletter email they receive from us, or (2) deleting their browser's cookies. As I mentioned above, internet privacy is something I care a lot about, and I feel that our tracking practices do not violate user privacy in any way. Thanks for your concern about this, and for your comment. Chris
Richard	October 10, 2009 8:57 AM It is quite difficult to manage newsletter campaign if you are not using right tools. Here I am talking about email marketing. Some days back(before 2 years) I used a form in my website to capture emails of my visitors and I used to mail them from my Gmail. I used to put them in BCC and send. :) Looks crazy right. Now I have learnt. I am using lot of newsletter managing software. So, what I want to tell is please learn about newsletter campaigns.
Games Online Free	November 10, 2009 2:03 PM Maintaining a newsletter for my website subscriber is quite cumbersome. I face lot of problems. But this post gives me an insight of how this is handled by newfangled. May be I should checkout the pricing and try this.