Writing Matters

Over-the-top newsletter list hygiene: "Do us a favor and unsubscribe"

As a long-time newsletter publisher, I am familiar with the reasons to "thin the herd" of subscribers who aren't reading the newsletter or responding to offers. A clean e-mail list means:

• Fewer spam complaints or bounces
• Accurate open and click-through rates
• The opportunity to focus on subscribers who will convert to sales or take action

But can e-mail list hygiene go too far?  Last week, I was told I was costing a newsletter money and asked to either start reading or opt out. Take a look at the e-mail I got from "ABCD Organization" (not the real name...)

From: ABCD
To: [email protected]
Subject: ABCD Newsletter Opt-Out. PLEASE READ!

Thank you for taking a minute to read this e-mail from the ABCD Organization (ABCD).

You are currently a subscriber to our monthly newsletter, ABCD eNews. If you are an ABCD member or an active reader of our newsletter, this e-mail doesn't apply to you and I thank you for your support.

If you receive ABCD eNews but do not open and read it, I'd like to ask you for a favor. Please use the "Unsubscribe" button at the end of this e-mail to remove yourself from our mailing list. The ABCD is a 503(c)(6) not-for-profit membership organization with limited resources and we have to pay for each issue of ABCD eNews e-mailed each month. If you're not reading what we send you, you'll be doing us a favor by taking this opportunity to unsubscribe by clicking on the "Unsubscribe" button below:

Thank you and please contact me if you have any questions.

John Doe
(contact info omitted)

I think ABCD bungled this opportunity to reconnect with eNews subscribers, and the "do us a favor" wording is really off-putting. (Maybe ABCD could find a cheaper way to distribute the newsletter?)

You can send a list clean-up e-mail to subscribers without destroying your relationship with them, as Kipp Chambers of the SmallBusinessTechTips.com blog has explained in his excellent post "Panic: Email Marketing List Maintenance Done Right." (His post is about Panic, a company that makes software for the Mac, not panic, the feeling that keeps you up at night.)

Chambers included this screenshot of the "We're Cleaning Up Our List" e-mail he received from Panic (click to enlarge). It's personal and friendly: "We love e-mailing our customers..." and "... click the sad button..." It invites subscribers to unsubscribe if they're no longer interested in the newsletter content, but it doesn't begrudge them a spot on the mailing list the way ABCD does.

As always, I am interested in your opinion. Post a comment or e-mail me to let me know what you think of ABCD's opt-out e-mail and strategy. If you would be willing to share your e-mail list hygiene methods or your own "We're Cleaning Up Our List" e-mail, that would be great.

 

E-Newsletter Metrics from MailerMailer: Opens, Clicks, Bounces, and More

E-mail marketing isn't dead, and MailerMailer, a web-based email list management service, can prove it.  They've just released their semiannual Email Marketing Metrics Report and, as usual, it is full of useful data, charts, and 2008-to-2007 comparisons of e-newsletter performance. If you’re looking for specific, concrete data—open, click, and bounce rates by industry—download this free report.

Some fascinating findings about e-mail newsletter performance:

• How soon do people open e-newsletters?  Soon, very soon. Nearly one third of recipients opened within two hours. And within about six hours of delivery, the story’s over.  If your recipients are going to open your e-mail at all, most of them will have done so within six hours.
• What are the best days to send e-newsletters? Sunday and Monday. Yes, people are catching up on their e-newsletters on the “day of rest.”
• What’s the right length for the subject line? According to the report, “Open rates decrease as subject line length increases.”  The data suggest that subject lines shorter than 35 characters do better than longer ones.

Use the data in this report to set goals for your own publication or to manage in-house expectations about your e-newsletter’s performance.  For example, if your boss considers your e-newsletter’s 27% open rate a “failure,” you might want to share this report’s finding that the average open rate across industries is only 13.20%!

Fine print: The report is based upon aggregate statistics from over 350 million email messages sent between January 1 and June 30, 2008 by a sampling of over 3,200 permission-based email senders (MailerMailer customers, including E-WRITE).

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

Archiving Back Issues of an E-Newsletter: When is Enough Enough?

Even with “Web 3.0” just around the corner, many companies continue to publish good old e-newsletters.  But handling the back issues of these newsletters can be a nagging content management problem.  How long should you make back issues of your e-newsletter available at your site?  How should you list these back issues? 

Before you decide to archive back issues, you must be absolutely sure that your site visitors will actually want to read your old e-newsletters.  Check your web stats, find out whether people call or e-mail to request back issues, and see whether anyone is linking to your old newsletter content.  Do as much research as possible before you commit to maintaining this ever-growing archive.  It is entirely possible that your subscribers are glad to read each issue of your e-newsletter, and that they’d appreciate having access to each issue for a month or two, and that’s it.  You may not want to publish an archive at all.

Here are five approaches to archiving back issues of an e-newsletter.  Watch out: the first two are examples of what not to do.