In a world where the average person receives 121 business emails per day, it can be easy for your newsletter to get lost in the crowd. The key is knowing how to get your audience’s attention.
But how? One thing that can help: technology. By using technology, the My HealtheVet Newsletter team has been able to gain more than one million subscribers. So don’t be afraid of using technology to help you analyze and listen to your audience while keeping them updated with the most recent information.
Data is your friend
Looking at data to review the effectiveness of your content can be one of your best practices to grow and keep subscribers. Using Google Analytics to review data allows you to see how subscribers are reacting to the material provided. Two very simple components of newsletter data are your email open and click rates. An email’s open rate is the percentage of subscribers who open the email, while an email’s click rate is the percentage of people who click on a link or image within the email.
If your newsletter has high open and click rates, you can infer subscribers are enjoying the content. By analyzing the articles with the most clicks, you get an understanding of what topics they’re most interested in. If readers are enjoying the content, they may share it with someone, giving them a chance to subscribe to your newsletter and grow your audience.
A newsletter with low open and click rates should evaluate its content, send time, and display because uninterested subscribers may either unsubscribe or continue to not engage with the content.
Analyzing data has helped the My HealtheVet Newsletter have an average open rate of 40% and click rate of 9% for this quarter alone. The industry average for open and click rates for health and fitness newsletters are about 21% and 3% according to MailChimp.com. So, let data be your friend, and it’ll show you the way to success.
Listen to your audience
Listening to your subscribers is another great way to help keep and grow your audience. You can do this in many different ways, but we interact with our My HealtheVet subscribers through polls and surveys.
Adding polls to articles has helped us gauge readers’ comprehension and given us ideas for new topics. For example, if we have an article that discusses making appointments on the My HealtheVet website, and the majority of Veterans answer a poll saying they haven’t made an appointment on My HealtheVet, we can assume that we need to include more information about making appointments on the website. After creating new content on the topic of appointments and repromotion of the article, we can compare the repromotion poll responses to the original poll responses. If we see a decrease in the number of Veterans saying they haven’t made an appointment on the My HealtheVet website, we know our efforts are working. By allowing readers to share what they might’ve learned in the article, polls create an easy way to boost engagement.
Using surveys allows us to get direct feedback from our readers. One of our survey questions is: “What topics are you most interested in for upcoming articles?” By using keyword filtering, we’re able to filter through more than 3,500 survey responses a month and create content that we know our readers want.
If we notice that a keyword like ‘diabetes’ has an increase in people requesting the topic, we can promote a diabetes-related article to answer the call. By listening to our subscribers, we give them the content they want without questioning if they want it.
Keep your content current
By keeping our website’s content relevant, we keep our readers engaged and up to date. I know what you’re thinking — changing and updating a website is time-consuming. But keeping your content fresh doesn’t take much effort at all. With an easily manageable content management system, you and your team can keep content relevant by just editing a few sentences, updating hyperlinks, and changing headlines. Your readers will appreciate the new information and will open, click, and engage with the content as if it was a brand new article.
These are just a few ways that technology can help you grow and keep your newsletter subscribers. If you need newsletter or subscriber engagement assistance, feel free to reach out to David Watson, Hillary Allen, or myself to point you in the right direction.
