Online newsletters: Tips to build readership

With all the effort that goes in to planning, researching, writing and preparing online newsletters, readership is key. How do you entice employees and other potential customers of your newsletters to click, open and read?

That’s a question that we’re often asked at Dulye & Co. Here’s a recent query about the readership challenge, followed by our recommendation for building interest.

Question: Recently, we began to email a monthly newsletter to the client’s approximately 35,000 global employees. The newsletter includes news, feature articles, and links to important company intranet sites. When employees open the email, they can scan short summaries of the articles and then click on a link for more information. Statistics for our second issue showed that 71% opened the email and 22% clicked on at least one link.

While we will measure the value of this channel through a company survey and employee focus groups to understand what messages are being heard and whether people believe the tool will help them contribute to the business, we also wanted to get a sense – a ball park perspective – of what benchmarks for opening emails and clicks might be used at your organizations.  That said we also recognize that comparing these benchmarks is akin to comparing bananas and pineapples – and should be driven by business needs.  Nonetheless, we’d like to have some sense of what might be considered a respectable target or best practice here.

We would enjoy hearing any suggestions (that we might adopt and adapt) regarding effective steps for improving the click-through links for a global email newsletter. Please leave a comment on this post.

Answer: Click and view statistics are a great first pass in determining your e-newsletter's readership. While developing e-newsletters for clients, Dulye & Co. has noticed that readership clicks can be quite variable. We see a low of 60% and a high of 1200% (meaning that the newsletter is opened several times or passed to other readers).

Although this is a good indication of readership, these stats don’t tell you the effectiveness of the communications channel. The best opening statistics we gain are from those e-newsletters in which the home page email comes from a senior leader in the company rather than the communications department. For example, we produce a newsletter that is distributed directly from the company business president. This newsletter regularly has opening statistics greater than 1000%.

Here are more quick tips to adopt:

1. Punch up the subject line of the email distribution by highlighting a timely topic. A good subject line always helps improve readership. 

2. To gauge the communications channel effectiveness, we recommend a regular readership poll that measures the knowledge and interest levels of the readers and what their preferred information sources are. The e-newsletter should be only one of the source options. This readership measurement can be a survey independent of the newsletter or a short pulse check that runs in the margin of the actual newsletter. A good tool for effectiveness measurement is also to study the individual story link clicks. This will guide you on the message effectiveness of each story and will also help you to determine your editorial content for later issues. Your goal would be to have the highest clicks on the stories containing your key messages.  We typically see readership interest above 40% for the top 3 stories and than a rapid decline for all other stories.

3. If your company has employees who don’t speak English as a primary language, then you need to provide options. It's imperative not to exclude non-English readers from this great resource.

4. Be sure that your readers can access your e-newsletter from home email accounts or computers. You don't want the company firewall to block home reading. This is key, because a significant number of people do their "casual" reading from home. If you do have a firewall challenge, consider hosting and distributing from a 3rd party service. For example, Dulye & Co. distributes clients’ e-newsletters for them. Where proprietary stories are concerned, those links are set up on the home server. However, the cover email comes from an outside server.