Email Newsletters

[Whitney Anderson]

My school sends five editions of email newsletters monthly. Our web team would like to kill enews for several reasons:
1. Decline in readership
2. For those reading, only reading average of 1.2 stories of the 10-12 per issue
3. Not interactive
4. Takes WAY too much time for what we get out of it. (I don't have ROI #s, but suspect they'd be horrible.) I think we could spend our time for more useful things.

We'd like to send short, direct emails (1 call to action) when appropriate and use our news blog for everything else and get people to subscribe. This way we can deliver timely, relevant info and it's only one thing at a time, more interactive, easier to maintain, etc.

However, this isn't a popular idea around campus.

Is anyone else still using an email newsletter? Your thoughts? Problems? Ideas?

Thanks!!
Whitney

[Michael Fienen]

I think that you've pretty much set the stage. If people are opposed to the change, ask them to defend keeping it against the obviously pitfalls. And go read up some of the good email info out there. Karlyn Morissette has written a lot on the subject, some of it here and here.

[Karine Joly]

If you choose to do direct emails, you might end up inundating email boxes with messages.

Instead of telling folks, you're going to kill the newsletters, why not tell them you're "upgrading" them by using your news blog as a central hub where readers will be able to subscribe via RSS, but also via email?

If they don't want to receive an email for every single item, maybe you can keep sending a recap newsletter (just links to stories from the blog) every other week. By offering options, you'll win over the naysayers - then when everybody is ok with the change, you might be able to drop the newsletter altogether.

What are your open rate and click through rate?

[TJ Iaciofano]

We have witnessed a rise in traffic to our RSS pages and a decline to News homepage. This concept of on-demand news delivered in a flexible format will ultimately win out. I was curious what products you're using to generate your newsletters and how you're measuring the traffic.

[Whitney Anderson]

Karine - I certainly don't want to send a bunch of direct emails and have people getting more, I would prefer for them to subscribe and get what they want. But, people are afraid to hope they come to us.

So, that's one of my compromise plans. To send a "recap" email with links to blog posts and web feature stories. Since we are already doing both of these as needed and it's not forced. For those who don't see them, they can get the recap email.

Our open rates and click through rates aren't that bad, although they are declining. Click through rates in 2008 for parents was 26%, alumni 18%, etc. So far, for 2009, alumni click-thru is 13%. Even though people are reading and clicking, they're only reading 1.2 stories per issue and we're writing between 10-12 or more. It just seems like a huge waste.

TJ - Well, a combination of things. We use Ingeniux as our CMS and build the enews there. Then we copy the html into our email software, Fire Engine Red and we use the stats in Fire Engine Red to measure the traffic.

[Charlie Triplett]

We just send out a single monthly "recap" kind of email at the end of each month.

We used to send out 3 versions of the same newsletter: Faculty/staff, alumni, and legislators. It contained full text news stories and e-newsletter "exclusives." We had two people probably spending about 20 hours a month on customizing/testing all three versions.

I pitched the idea of sending out a single, simple plain newsletter that gave each worthwhile story a thumbnail, excerpt, and a link to the full story, with the reasoning that a) the time could be spent elsewhere (it's not as if they enjoyed the process) and b) we could drive more traffic to the website, and drive that traffic to the Giving section.

In our mind, the point of the newsletter is to continue the relationship with people— to remind them that we exist (And that we need their money).

There was a natural amount of resistance at first, but I remind people that it's the web, it can change if we make a mistake.

It takes about an hour to code it now, people continue to subscribe, and we all continue to get along.

Example: http://engineeringnews.missouri.edu/Jan09/

[Brenden Sparks]

When you say it's not a popular idea around campus, I think that the campus population you're referring to isn't afraid of losing email newsletters specifically, but instead they are afraid of losing a channel to their audience.

Establishing a news hub with an rss feed (or targeted rss feeds for things like athletics, academics, arts, etc, etc) would probably give you a larger readership, since people are more inclined to read an rss feed than a long email that lands in their already full inboxes.

Is your email list an opt-in list? Because if you're getting fewer readers and people are steadily unsubscribing then you are losing valuable contacts.

Reserve emails for important messages and keep campus news on the campus website, but syndicate it and make it easily accessible in different formats. Let the audience choose how they want to receive communications from the university.

[Nathan Ronchetti]

We're doing what we can without RSS for now by consolidating our coverage into fewer messages for the external community 2-3 times a month, tops. Instead of a new eblast for each event, sending out bimonthly updates just makes more sense.

For recruitment purposes, we were actually surprised to hear that the trend should be to hit prospectives hard and frequently. The thought from a recent presentation was that these incoming students don't check email as often, coupled with the amount of messages they receive from a variety of sources. In the case of higher ed, hitting them repeatedly gives your institution a better chance that the students will read the message, near the top of their "unread" pile of mail. This was coming from a company that handles a subscriber list of 125,000 for daily financial messages and a wealth of clients on the higher ed side.

That may be the norm for that company, when sending out mailings many, many times over the amount of coverage we enjoy--we've always seen better read and click rates when a messages content is stronger or tied to recent admission information--or when sent to parents.

[Charlie Triplett]

You might talk to Andrew Careaga from MST.edu. As I recall, they went through a very similar process campus wide. Having an institutional example often helps.

[Whitney Anderson]

I think we've figured out what we're going to do that makes the most sense for us.

We're going to take the top couple news stories, blog posts, sport stories and feature stories and send it out monthly as the new "enews". The BIG difference is that it will be automated except for the selection of the stories, but we won't be writing anything specifically for the purpose of enews and we won't be creating a ton of extra pages that don't integrate very well into the main site.

This way we're writing things when they need to be written, and everything will be more timely and relevant. However, for those not subscribed to our various feeds, we'll push out this new automated recap email once a month.

We'll also send direct emails when appropriate, as we're currently doing.

This is the plan. We'll see how it goes.

[Chad Holden]

We have a few lists here on campus with different options for unsubscribing. Our emergency list is mandatory, our staff and faculty list is optional, but our student and important updates list has mandatory membership if you're a student or staff on campus.