Skip to content

Blog

Members Public

Don't call it a newsletter. Don't ask readers to subscribe.

Over the years, unscrupulous businesses have given “subscriptions” and “newsletters” are bad name among many readers. A good way to combat newsletter fatigue and separate yourself from the crowd is to name your newsletter something more fun, honest, and relatable. You can own a day, like Sunday Dispatches [https://pjrvs.

Members Public

Attracting Subscribers to Your Newsletter: Lead Generators

How do you get more people to sign up for your newsletter? The best way is one of the oldest: offer the reader something useful, valuable, and closely related to the subject matter of newsletter for their subscription. Some call this a lead generator, although that term is only really

Members Public

Recommended: Chimp Essentials

If you’re using MailChimp, you need to take Paul Jarvis’s course Chimp Essentials [https://chimpessentials.com]. It paid for itself within a few months and has since saved me even more money and time. I’m not an affiliate. I’m not being paid to say this. It’

Members Public

Subject lines don’t matter as much as your From line.

There’s a debate about what kind of subject line works best for newsletters. Do you craft each one individually, or do you make one, uniform subject line for your newsletter that never changes (except maybe the issue number). I do both. The following two examples are subject lines on

Members Public

Conquer Newsletter Obesity

Over time, your list of subscribers will become bloated with the no-longer-interested, no-longer-reading, or no-longer-with-us. This decreases your open rate, bleeds your wallet, and makes you look more like a spammer to email providers. For personal newsletters and small business newsletters, the solution is to simply prune your list of

Members Public

Don’t personalize. Write like a person.

Every newsletter has a different idea about how you should greet a new reader, and keep in touch with funnel-ized “personalized messages.” I don’t agree with most of them. It’s true, if you’re a business, using a person's name in any email will probably increase

Members Public

Recommended: Do Open

If you don't know where to start in creating a newsletter, the book Do Open [https://amzn.to/39gfesV] is what I always recommend. In fact, I give it out to anyone I work with on a new newsletter. It's the perfect, easy-to-read, back-to-basics start for

Recommended: Do Open
Members Public

Introduce Yourself!

Wondering why email newsletters are starting to introduce themselves with every issue lately? It’s a practice that goes back years, but was recently popularized (and templatized) by Craig Mod in his post, On Being a Good Newsletterer [https://craigmod.com/essays/on_writing_good_newsletters/]. He offers the following

Members Public

Finding Your Favorite Newsletter Format

If you have a personal newsletter, the structure of newsletter should not be much a struggle. Personal newsletters tend to train their audiences in how they should be read. So, the goal here is to find the format that not only attracts and keeps your ideal reader, but fits your

Members Public

Define Your Audience

Although you don’t have a say in the make up of your audience on social media, email newsletters give you the freedom of defining your own constraints. What’s the goal of your newsletter? Establishing a better relationship with your existing audience? Growing that audience? Selling a product? Segmenting