Newsletter Optimization Help - Anyone know someone?

[GoAbroadKP]

Hi Moz'ers!

I am looking for some help and possibly a referral. My organization has a massive newsletter, 180k subscribers but the performance of the newsletter has been decreasing over the past couple of years with a really poor CTR. I am looking for someone to help optimize and provide recommendation on how we can better the newsletter performance again.

We are in the international education and travel business, primary audience is college students within the US/UK/AUS.

If anyone has a recommendation of an agency or consultant specializing in newsletters optimization, that would be amaze-balls!

[LesleyPaone]

If I were to make a suggestion, you might mention what industry they are in. I know a lot of us SEO / Marketing people have industries that we are better in than others.

[GoAbroadKP]

You are very correct! Thanks for the suggestion and I just added!

[DanielFreedman]

The most common mistakes:

• Too many links
• Too many items -- overall length is too long

Therefore:

• **Lack of focus **

In most cases there should be a single, clear call to action....but it can be included two or three times.

I've seen all too many newsletters that bury the call to action as the 18th of 24 links!

If there is great and useful content, it might be wiser to send shorter but more frequent newsletters. Some should have no specific product plugs...just great info. Counter-intuitive, I know!

If the audience is college students, you might want to consider embedding 60-seond videos videos.

I have quite a bit of experience in travel and education and would be happy to talk to you offline.

[mikeusry]

Mr Freedman makes some great points. Typically short and sweet is a more ideal approach. Sometimes timing and day of the week can have a dramatic effect as well. What are you typical CTA's and how clear is that action point? I might suggest Litmus if you are not already using it. We have found that handcoding responsive emails and running it through Litmus gives us a decent bump.

[webmethod]

Some good responses already. I would add that if you're not already segmenting your audience then you definitely should be to make sure you're measuring the 'real' performance. For example, if in your 180k subscriber list, you have 90k people who haven't placed an order in 90 days and 10k customers who order with you every month then your open rates within the 'engaged' proportion of users will be swamped by the staleness of the rest of the list. Subscriber lists grow with growing businesses, and naturally develop dead wood so churning out the same sorts of emails means the stats can gradually over time decline.

You can combat this by (very simply) segmenting your 'active' base from your inactive base - by all means send them the same email but track their stats separately. Then when you start to invest in your emails, you'll be able to see if your active base are affected, rather than them all being lumped together with any increases/decreases in the performance of key sections of your customer base being concealed.

Finally in terms of email performance, I would use CTR/open rate purely as informative, because really it's revenue and margin that matter to the business.