Give Them What They Want: Delivering a Better eNewsletter
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Hear from Lindsey Kellman, Communications Manager at the National Kidney Foundation, and learn how they were able to improve engagement in their monthly enewsletter, resulting in a 155% lift in open rates and the re-engagement of more than 13,000 inactive subscribers! You'll learn what you need to know to implement a similar program at your organization, and why engagement is critical to your email program and improving your ROI.
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Give Them What They Want: Delivering a Better eNewsletter
- 1. Give Them What They Want: A Better eNewsletter Jeanette Brown – Informz Email Rockstar Guest: Lindsey Kellman- NKF
- 4. About Me @emktg_guru
- 5. About Lindsey Lindsey Kellman
- 6. Why is Engagement Important?
- 8. NKF’s Challenge 60% 57% 50% 40% 30% Open Unengaged 20% 11% 10% 0% LYK
- 10. Big Picture Goal Give readers what they really want!
- 11. Delivering a Better e-Newsletter How?
- 12. Strategy is Must
- 13. Three Step Plan Step 1: Identify unengaged subscribers
- 14. Three Step Plan Step 2: Temporarily stop sending emails to this audience
- 15. Three Step Plan Step 3: Develop outreach approach
- 16. Why 3 Steps? • Baby steps • Dormant can take time • Each communication needs to be thought through.
- 17. Tips to Start • Identify one main communication piece • Exhaust other testing options • Define a timeframe
- 19. Communication Strategy Subject Lines • Are You Interested in a $50 Visa Gift Card? • Last Chance to Renew Your Love Your Kidneys • Don’t Let Your Subscription Fade Away
- 20. Survey Questions • Are you interested in continuing to receive Love Your Kidneys? • Yes – I’m interested in the following: • No: – I would like to end my subscription because:
- 21. Survey
- 22. Results 35% 30% 150% lift in opens 25% 14% lift in CTR 20% 15% 10% Open CTR 5% 0% Before After
- 23. Results Over 13,000 took action to keep receiving LYK
- 24. Campaign Conclusions and Tips
- 25. Next Steps and Future Plans
- 26. Newsletter Tips
- 27. Newsletter Takeaways • Look at what device they are reading on and redesign • Test out subject lines • Don’t ignore the unengaged – Dormant them – Include sample newsletter – Survey them – Remove them
- 28. Email Rockstar
- 29. Let us help you! Jeanette Brown brown@informz.com @emktg_guru www.informz.com 1.888.371.1842 @informz
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone and welcome
- Engagement among different types of messaging varies. In the chart in front of you, from our 2012 email benchmark report, shows that enewsletters range right in the middle for engagement. Typically these pieces are consistent, newsworthy and useful to our readers. But what happens when the key communication vehicle you rely on, is no longer being read by the majority of your list? Before taking any drastic measures to redesign the communication piece, you first must go through a discovery process. That is what national kidney foundation did.
- Good afternoon everyone, I am jeanette brown and I will be your host for today.For those of you who don’t know who Informz is,– we are an email service provider with a range of solutions, including those you see on your screen. And because these solutions all live on one platform, the data is captured and can be leveraged again and again. All too often I see the difficulties of having data here and there and nothing really talks to one another, which can be a big struggle with many organizations. Making them talk will allow you to work smarter and not harder.
- As for me, I have worked in the marketing departments at a couple of associations prior to joining the Informz team, and understand what many of you face when it comes to communicating to your members. From membership to conference marketing, I have done it all.As the marketing strategy manager at Informz, I work directly with our clients to achieve certain goals they have for their campaigns, such as membership welcome campaigns as well as re-engagement campaigns like the one you will see today. I would also like to introduce our guest today
- Our guest speaker today is the communications manager at National Kidney Foundation. Lindsey is responsible for creating internal and external communication and marketing materials, all in an effort to raise awareness of chronic kidney disease, including prevention, early detection and treatment.On a personal note, Lindsey loves to travel and prefers more exoctic locales, I couldn’t agree more!Today you will here from Lindsey on the steps she took to reach out to subscribers of her newsletter that had not been engaged and what insight she gained because of this effort.First, lets look at how list size could effect your engagement.
- JBLets look at how many emails is too many. It is basically all over the board. For your own programs, this is a great report to look at, to really determine how many emails you are sending and how it relates to your unsubscribe rate as well as your bottom line.Your subscribers are your lifeblood of your email program, without them, your messaging would have no place to go. Engaging them from day one through day 500 and beyond, will help your deliverability rate and in the end, your relationship with each one. Ignoring the unengaged is just not an option these days.
- I want to turn it over to Lindsey to walk you through what she was facing. Lindsey take it away!
- So this is where a strategy is a must. Lindsey was able to identify the problem, get her team on board, but now it was time to create a strategy. The first part of engaging newsletter subscribers comes in the form of identifying those that are less engaged to see what can change. Lindsey, please walk us through your three step process
- Great Lindsey, so why a 3 step plan, why can’t you just email once and be done with it right? Well, think about it this way, you didn’t get them that quickly so don’t get rid of them that quickly. After identifying who they are, a key piece of Lindsey’s strategy was to dormant the names from one of the newsletters. This is great, these individuals have not been engaged, so they are not going to miss the newsletter, so why not turn down the noise. So some quick tips on how to start a process such as this are:
- Before setting out on the road to try to re-engage those who are fallen away, there are a few things to think of before starting this.First, pick out one main communication piece, such as your newsletter. You have a history on these subscribers and can easily focus on this one piece than every email.Next, before reaching out to these unengaged, ask your self this, have you exhausted other testing options first? Have you tested out different subject lines, optimized the timing of your newsletter? If the answer is no, do this first, take the time and effort to create the best newsletter you can before identifying the unengaged.And lastly, define the length of time one must be unengaged to qualify for your upcoming strategy.So with this foundation, Lindsey, show everyone the types of emails that you sent to this group.
- Lindsey, thank you for showing us what great results you saw and especially the new design of your newsletter. To wrap things up before we move on to questions, I wanted to recap what lindsey has done to reach this point.
- First, identify what device they are reading on. This is a great step to take in the beginning of the process as well to get a better idea of how functional the newsletter really is for them.As I said in the beginning, test out those subject lines, don’t keep using the same one week after week. What lindsey didn’t show here today was that she identified the top stories that were clicked on each week, which in her case were her top tip articles and started using that in the subject line. In addition, the recipe articles were number two and she included those as a pre-header. Grabbing the readers attention in the first few seconds is essential to engagement. And lastly, after you have tested and optimized, don’t ignore those that are still unengaged. One tip that Lindsey showed was to include a sample of the newsletter in the re-engagement emails that are sent out. They haven’t read it so this is a great time to remind them what they have been missing!A survey is a great way to gain feedback. And don’t just send a survey to those that are unengaged, throughout the year, survey those that are engaged, finding out what keeps them around. And lastly, remove those that stay unengaged. This may be hard, but if you can do it, you will see more accurate email results and your subscribers will be thankful for it.
- Lindsey, you showed today that you are an email rockstar. Taking charge of your enewsletter and ensuring that your subscribers are the right target group for it, is a great use of email best practices. AT this tiem I would like to open it up for questions.
- Now that you’ve removed a lot of inactive subscriber email addresses, how do you work to grow your subscriber list and increase your constituent base?Quarterly perform outreach to all new email addresses in our database to share more information about available NKF resources and “invite” them to subscribe to our various newslettersSocial media cross promotionMade enewsletter sign up link more prominent on the front page of our websiteIs there anything simpler to do to clean up or maintain your email lists? That’s a great question. In this scenario we really needed to perform an email list overhaul. Something that we should have been doing on an ongoing basis was cleaning out all of the emails that had bounced back. Instead these remained on our email distribution list for a long time. Within Informz, it is easy to manually unsubscribe these “hard bouncers” and “repeat bouncers” and I encourage everyone to do so in order to improve deliverability and remove non-working email addresses from your list. We now do this regularly!