E-mail strategy

Recently our organization shifted from a quarterly newsletter to 20,000 subscribers to sending e-newsletters to 2,000 e-mail addresses. Does anyone have suggestions as to how we can grow our e-mail list beyond placing a "sign up for our newsletter" form on our Web site?

Thanks,
Andrea Wetzel
http://www.specialolympicswisconsin.org/

Hi Andrea,

Let me first recommend that your "Sign up for our newsletter" feature should appear on ALL your pages, not just on your site's main page. I would even place it somewhere close to the navigation menu because you're sure that people will see it there. Also, it would be better to make the most recent issue open in a new browser window.

A subscriber base of 20K is a really nice fan club. These are people you don't want to lose. Have they been informed about your organization's recent switch to the e-newsletter format? I would do everything in my power to lure these people into signing up to your e-newsletter. Contact them and encourage them to sign up!

You might also want to give people some kind of incentive to sign up. Can you think of something that would encourage people to join your e-mail list? Maybe something like a chance to win a pair of free tickets to a sporting event? It can be anything, really.

Use every opportunity available to get the word out about signing up for your e-newsletter. Mention it in all your online and offline collateral (flyers, brochures, external e-mails, e-mail signatures, etc).


By the way, I notice you have a message board on your site. This is nice feature and it's one you can use as a marketing vehicle to promote your newsletter. Post a message on the board about your newsletter and include a link to the sign-up page. You can also make this message a "sticky" that always appears at the top of the message board for maximum visibility.

Just a few ideas for you. I'm sure others here can offer additional tips.

Yann

Building a mailing list takes time. There are chain email campaigns that can increase the response rate, and distributed business card raffles are also an effective option. We rely heavely on core donors to refer new e-update recepients.

I would also suggest stripping down your e-list form to First Name, Last Name, Email Address and embed the form on every page.

Thanks for the great suggestions. I updated the site so that the e-mail sign up form is on every page. Hopefully that will boost our conversion rate a bit.

I see also that you've posted a sticky on your forum. Good job.

Yann

I'd go further and strip the sign up to just the email address - you can have this field and a subscribe button on every page of your site without disturbing your design much.

Make plenty of assurances that you won't share the address with any other organisation/purpose and have a privacy policy in place. If people have to ask these questions they won't - and won't sign up either.

And consider setting up a newsletter RSS feed - its the future!

I'm hesitant to strip down the form to e-mail address only because we hope to match as many of the e-mail addresses with our existing database records as possible..

Also, I like to personalize each e-mail with a first name in the greeting

That is a good reason to ask for first name, last name. Remember though that names aren't unique (unlike email addresses). If you start collecting email addresses in another way for your database, you should count those as definitive rather than anything gathered from the web.

Also note that some spam filters (SpamAssassin for example) frown upon using "Dear (someone)" more than general "Dear Friend" introductions.

Andrea - I checked out the email sign up on your site. There are two quick suggestions I had. I tried to sign up and it let me submit even without a properly formatted email address (I just put in a.ellis, no "@", and no domain). There are some pretty simple scripts that you can add to check and make sure that the email address is in a valid format, so it would help keep your list clean. I'm not a java pro, but others may have suggestions for free, reliable script sites you could get this from.

Also, it looks like you have a lot of space on the 2nd page where you ask the visitor for more complete information. It might be helpful to add a few sentences about the e-newsletter, espescially the frequency. People will probably be more likly to give out their email address if they know how frequent the communication will be (monthly, periodic, weekly, daily???). Others may have different views, but we find with our weekly e-newsletter it helps to let people know what they're getting into so they don't get overwhelmed. (http://www.aicr.org/information/recipe/email.lasso)