How to create a strong eNewsletter

I originally started writing this post as a quick comparison of the effectiveness of eNewsletters and eDMs. What I have produced is a quick guide for creating an engaging and enticing eNewsletter however. I will look at how you can use eDMs to enhance your communications strategy in my next post.

 Before you sit down to either start to plan or enhance your eNewsletter, take the time to think through the following questions. Too often, Nonprofit eNewsletters end up being carbon copies of one another, and while there is nothing wrong with this, this type of newsletter will not help your organisation stand out for the right reasons.

1. Why are you putting an eNewsletter together? What have you got to say that's need-to-know information?

2. What information can you offer that is unique and critical to your audience?

3. What are you saying that's different to the other organisations that work in your space? Why should your audience open your eNewsletter first, or make it the only eNewsletter they open from a flooded inbox?

If you start by asking these 3 questions, you will be examining the essential elements for the creation and continuation of an eNewsletter that stands out of the pack and is exciting.

Don't be afraid to separate out your eNewsletters if you have a diverse audience you are trying to reach. You may wish to allow users to subscribe to a monthly eNewsletter, and to produce separate news blasts that are produced as soon as news breaks within your organisation for example. Creating options allows your audience to engage with you on their terms, and allows you to deliver the information that's relevant (as well as the information that's likely to create conversions on your web site.)

Finally, here is a list of email basics that you should consider when putting your eNewsletter together:

• Ensure your subject line is 50 characters or less - any longer and your subscribers won't be able to read the whole title as soon as it hits their inbox and it will lose it's impact.
  
• Ensure your organisation's name is in the 'from' line - this saves you valuable subject line space and makes your eNewsletter look legitimate.
  
• Ensure that your eNewsletter as a whole is no more than 250-300 characters. This stops your readers having to scroll down to read your content and getting put off.
  
• Never use more than one paragraph to discuss a topic - link through to an optimised landing page with the relevant content if you have more information than this.
  
• Avoid using too many images on the email itself, or making the eNewsletter one big image, as up to 60% of your recipients will have their images disabled when your eNewsletter arrives in their inbox.
  
• Write in a conversational tone where appropriate - email and eNewsletters are a relatively informal medium. Aim to engage and excite interest in you, your cause and your work at every step of the way!
  
• Think about including content that's not just your own - draw your audience's attention to relevant information that may not be produced by your organisation. Try to make your organisation the resource that your audiences turn to when they're looking for information on a particular subject - don't be ashamed to aggregate information and to turn your newsletter into a resource that promotes more than just your brand. This will ensure that your audience turns to you and your web site on a daily basis, rather than just when they remember to make a donation or want your contact details.

This is by no means an exhaustive list however - do you have anything that you can add to this?

Growing Your Email List

Here at Blackbaud Pacific, we've recently launched a new email service offering called Blackbaud Reach. 

 Blackbaud Reach is a consulting package designed to help your organisation reach the right audience at the right time with targeted emails and newsletters.

 I have had the opportunity to speak to a variety of Blackbaud clients while developing this offering, and I have been struck by the amount of organisations who tell me that they would love to improve their email marketing, but who have little or no email list. 

 Growing an email list should be an ongoing priority for all organisations, as at least 5% of any email list will likely be 'churning' (or unsubscribing) at any time.

 The easiest way to start growing your email list is to start asking your audience for their email addresses at every touch point you have. This extends from beyond just the online environment to every single touch point you have with your audience. 

I have started keeping a basic list of the places you should consider asking for email addresses to grow your email list. This is only intended as a starting point, so please make a copy and expand and grow on this as required:

• Capture subscriptions on all forms on your site
• Give users the option to opt-in to your list in all transactional emails
• Encourage your existing audience to forward your emails and content to friends/family
• Promote your email lists through your Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as any other social media accounts you have
• Always ask in face-to-face meetings if anyone would like to join your email list
• Put subscription links in your email signatures
• Link to your email registration options from every page of your web site (and always list the benefits of subscribing)
• Promote your subscriptions via any RSS feed you distribute
• Include subscription forms or web site links on all printed materials (including business cards)
• Ensure that you have such engaging content on your web site and online aggregators that people deliberately seek out ways to keep up-to-date with your new content!

You also need to ensure that once people subscribe to your list, they have reason to stay subscribed. You need to manage your email frequency to ensure that you are not threatening your subscribers with information overload, but you need to be staying in touch enough for them to remember who your organisation is. Always remember that you are competing for a share of voice against more media than just the emails of your competitors.

Once you have promoted your list effectively, online and off, you really need to start looking at why your audience should give you their email address in the first place. What do you have to offer them that's worth them giving you their email address for? Have you focused on the benefits and special offers that come as being a part of your list? Why should people choose to subscribe to your email services and not those of another organisation?

Once your list starts growing, you can then start to consider exactly how you wish to engage your audience, and what type of emails you will be using to do this. You may even wish to start up multiple lists depending on the type of subscriptions you plan on offering. Two of the most obvious starting points are eNewsletters, and eDMs (electronic direct mail).

I will touch on how you can use these two different email types to engage and motivate your audience in my next post.

For information on the new Blackbaud Reach offering for Blackbaud Pacific clients, visit this Brainshark.

 

Good Copywriting

There is nothing more likely to produce writer's block than a blank white page staring you in the face. And that’s exactly what’s facing me right now as I get ready to kick this blog off.

With this in mind, I think a good place to start this blog is with a discussion of online copywriting. While this won’t help with issues of writers block, I think that this is a very basic element of every organisation’s online presence that is often overlooked.

Good copywriting means keeping your online texts as short, sharp and crisp as possible. Consider that most online readers have limited attention spans and various activities competing for their time. Don’t be afraid to adhere to the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Whether you’re writing copy for your web site, or creating a new email, you should be limiting your copy to 250-300 words. Make your pages or emails any longer, and you risk forcing your readers to scroll down the page for quite a few seconds. This doesn’t sound like a problem until you consider how infrequently you scroll down websites unless you’re looking for something specific. For most of us, it’s close to never.

With this in mind, here are some other tips to help your online writing:

• Ensure you have a clear brief/purpose before starting.
• Ensure that your writing style is short and to the point. Think about both you vocabulary/word usage and your overall structure/composition.
• If a sentence gets too long, create two.
• Understand your organisation’s personality (and write with this tone!)
• Write in the language of your audience – don’t use words they wouldn’t use.
• Chunk your text into clear paragraphs – the internet is a land of skimmers.
• Use lots of headings to show where information is held, and sub-headings to break information up.
• Don’t be afraid of white space.
  

Another tip that has helped me enormously is the FBI approach to copywriting.

The FBI approach is a really good tool to help you condense what you’re trying to say down to its essence.  You start by discussing the features of your suggestion, outline the benefits of these, then conclude with the implications of your suggested outcome.

If you are looking to encourage more child sponsorships within your organisation for example, the FBI approach may help you say something like:

With ten years of experience in child sponsorship, Organisation X knows how to make all of your sponsorship dollars count. Ensure your sponsorship helps not just a child, but an entire community.

To break this down, included in this statement is a:

• Feature  (Ten years of experience)
• Benefit ( Make all of your sponsorship dollars count)
• Implication (Help not just a child, but an entire community)
  

You can use the FBI approach within sentences, across paragraphs or to structure entire pages of content. It may not seem like a natural approach when you try to use this method initially, but I promise that it will get easier over time!

Hopefully these suggestions will give you some good ideas to start improving your copywriting, although these are only the tip of the iceberg. If you’re interested in looking into this further, think about visiting Online Copywriting 101 from Grokdotcom.com and Copywriting 101: An Introduction to Copywriting on Copyblogger.

Welcome to eMarketing Essentials

Welcome!

I work as an Online Marketing Consultant at Blackbaud Pacific within the Internet Services Division (ISD), and I'm based in Sydney, Australia.

I'll be blogging about a how to promote your organisation online, as well as how to optimise your online presence to encourage constituent engagement. I'm particularly interested in email marketing, social networking, search engine optimisation (SEO) and content marketing, so look for new posts discussing these in the future!