I recently asked for feedback on what could be improved in
my newsletter. I had a bit of a chuckle when I got four responses about
frequency and all four were different. One person wanted once per month,
another every two weeks, another person was weekly, and finally a person wanted
this email twice per week. I have a feeling somewhere in the middle of all that
is where I’ll rest the frequency (2-3 times per month). I think that this will ultimately
rest with value. Can I bring new and good value every few weeks? I believe so. Twice
a week? Nope, unless I decided to shift to releasing serials.
What’s more interesting to me is the other feedback I received,
both in the reports and in replies. My reports say that offering an “instant
win” contest increases the amount of clicks in the email. That’s not a huge
surprise. However, it also decreased the amount of unsubscribes (by about 3x),
which is a surprise. The amount of opens was about the same as average.
The replies revealed a few things: people like cute animal
photos (not a surprise) and that they want to hear more about the works in
progress (which is a surprise). I was trying to keep my works in progress to
just a couple paragraphs, perhaps a cover reveal. It sounds like they would
also like quotes and perhaps a bit more.
The final interesting fact I learned is that cross-promotion
to relevant freebies doesn’t frustrate the readers. I was worried they would
find this “spammy”, but if it’s in the same category and has a theme… it seems
to fit. For example, if you write fantasy, and find a free eBook promotion for
Halloween fantasy books in October…they want to hear about that.
Overall, I think I may need to re-evaluate my original
newsletter strategy. The whole focus was on separating audiences; one with
cross-promotion, another with just promoting my works. It seems I can combine both
of those in a single email, which means I shouldn’t be worrying as much. I
still might keep these audiences separated, so that I can control the amount of
cross-promotion a bit better. I also like the idea of being able to “trial and
error” twice as fast with newsletter ideas. I also like being able to ask
different questions in each mailing, which helps me focus in on what people
want.
The current format I want to use is:
- Say Hello (What’s in the email)
- Cute animal photo
- Audio Book Review Requests
- Instant Win Contest
- Works in Progress
- Relevant Cross Promotion
- Questions for the list (reply and let me know)
