Lately I've been thinking about newsletters because I have no life and this job occupies my time 24/7. Just kidding...kind of. Actually, SEOmoz has been sending out monthly newsletters to PRO members for a few months now, and it's made me start to look differently at the newsletters I receive. What do I pay attention to, and what do I instantly delete, and why? I thought I'd share some newsletters that I've scrounged up from my inbox from the past year and analyze their successes and failures.
1. Make sure you can actually read the newsletter. Monsoon is a Vietnamese fusion-type restaurant that I live near, and they send me a newsletter every so often. This is what it looks like:
Yeeeeeah...black text on a maroon background isn't exactly readable.
Here's another example. This is a Marriott newsletter I received:
I personally have a problem with the rows of teeny tiny city listings. They're a bit hard to read very clearly because they're so small and they're clumped together. Also, each one of them is a link, and when they're so closely listed it can be hard to click on the deal you're interested in.
2. Don't make your newsletters excruciatingly long.
Landmark Theatres is a movie theater chain that has a lot of locations in Seattle. They regularly send me their newsletters.
I love the information they display: current releases on the left-hand side, movies opening this week, etc. However, their newsletters are extremely long and require a lot of scrolling. My interest wanes the more I scroll, to the point where I just look at the information at the top and delete the newsletter, missing any vital information that may appear at the bottom.
Try and keep your newsletters to a reasonable length--do you really need all of that information you're displaying? Maybe you need to up it to a twice-monthly newsletter if there's too much information for a once monthly email; or, maybe you're not thinking about the actual, essential, interesting information that your readers will want to hear about.
3. Don't inundate your readers with nothing but text.
Kayak sends me their newsletter, and this is what they typically look like:
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Not only is their newsletter long, it's tedious and full of text blocks. They essentially list a city and write a big blurb about it, then lather, rinse, repeat. It's pretty boring. Why not just focus on a select number of cities and include an enticing image? I wouldn't mind seeing a lovely pic of Aruba beach. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
4. Make your newsletters appear clean and properly formatted.
The SMX newsletter looks a bit cluttered and text-jumbly to me:
The numbered list looks especially crammed. I think spacing the list out more would have made it look better.
5. Make sure your outbound links work properly before sending your newsletter.
This last example, unfortunately, is from our own newsletter. This week we sent out a newsletter that included a link to my email address, but we accidentally misspelled my name:
It may be hard to read, but the "RSVP with Rebecca" link pointed at "mailto:[email protected]." I received quite a few emails from our members notifying me of the typo and the delivery failure status they received when they tried to email me with the wrong address.
Okay, I've shared some examples of newsletters that need a bit of tweaking. Now I'll show you some newsletters I do enjoy:
1. IndieFlix
IndieFlix is an independent film site based in Seattle. I signed up for their newsletter one year at the Seattle International Film Festival. (I attend the festival every year--one time I saw 11 movies in one weekend. But I digress.)
IndieFlix's newsletter is a lot like the Landmark Theatres newsletter I shared earlier on in this post. The reason I like this newsletter better is that it offers the same compelling, interesting information (new releases, movie synopses) but in a much more concise manner. Two thumbs up!
2. Active.com
I participated in some race a year or two back (it was either a half or full marathon, I can't exactly remember), and got automatically signed up for the Active.com newsletter. I've not canceled because their newsletter is one of my favorites:
(Sorry this one's so big--I accidentally saved the screenshot without resizing it, and now when I try to size it down it becomes too hard to read.) Active's newsletter does well what Marriott's newsletter does poorly--shares a list of links. Active's links are easy to read and click on. I also love the information shared in each newsletter--it's interesting and valuable to hear about local race events that I may want to participate in or sign up for.
3. SEMpdx
If SMX's newsletter were as cleanly formatted as SEMpdx's, I'd have no problem reading and absorbing the information they send me:
Clean titles, good spacing, blog post snippets that link to the complete piece--I love it!
4. Barack Obama
I'll leave the politics at the door and focus purely on the newsletter. The Obama newsletters rarely get sent out with images, yet they don't feel bogged down with text.
It's a relatively short message, is cleanly formatted, and breaks up the chunks of text with links, bolded sentences, and quotes. I also especially like the titles of their newsletters--I saw "Watch this video" and it immediately caught my eye. If it were titled something like "Barack Obama Campaign Update for May," my interest wouldn't be as piqued and I'd be less inclined to open the newsletter right away.
Speaking of catchy titles, I'm going to talk about my favorite newsletter...
5. Yelp
I love Yelp's newsletters. First of all, their titles are cleverly written and very eye-catching:
A well written title or email subject means more people are enticed to open the email and read more information.
Secondly, the newsletter does everything right--incorporates images, links out to more information, bolds the perfect amount of sentences and phrases for proper emphasis, and formats their text for easy reading. Here's a newsletter I received about bbq restaurants in Seattle:
That, my friends, is a gorgeous newsletter. Also, notice the "Send to a Friend" button in the upper-right corner. Yelp's newsletters are so great that Jeff actually sent one to me:
When people actually want to share your newsletter with others, that's a good sign that you're doing something right. (And yes, my boyfriend and I love mac and cheese. Send recipes to rebecca<at>seomoz.org.)
To summarize, I'll share what I've picked up to be newsletter best practices:
- Check your outbound links to make sure they're working properly.
- Break up monotonous blocks of text with images, links, quotes, and bolded phrases to make the content more easily readable.
- Format your newsletters so they have a professional layout.
- Make sure your newsletter design is easy on the eyes--use highly contrasting colors to avoid having the colors blur together.
- Keep your newsletters relatively concise. If they're too long, trim out superfluous information or consider sending more frequent, shorter newsletters.
- Proofread your copy before sending it out to the masses. Typos and grammatical errors look unprofessional and sloppy.
- Play around with catchy email titles/subject lines for a higher open rate. Try to support your compelling title with compelling, interesting content in the body of your email.
- Um, I like macaroni and cheese. And independent films. And running. (Geez, come to think of it, you all have learned quite a bit about me based solely on the newsletters I receive. Hmmm...)
I hope that some of my examples were valuable. I'm not claiming to be an all-knowing newsletter expert (after all, our own newsletter fell under the "Guilty" list)--I just shared some of my personal opinions. If you have any other tips on how to create a compelling newsletter, I'd love to hear them.
I emailed this to Rebecca, but just wanted to say it publicly here on the blog.
This post may not get the respect it deserves from the blogosphere in terms of links or thumbs up, but it's the kind of post that would make me subscribe to a blog. The litany of examples and the concise suggestions are excellent.
I agree - proper useful.
Thanks, Rand. I had a lot of fun crafting this post, and I was a little surprised that it didn't get more traction than it did, but I really appreciate the comments and the conversations that people are striking up.
If SEOmoz is using Google Apps for Your Domain, the "rbecca" problem is easy to solve: alias the misspelled email address to your actual address. Sorta like 301'ing old pages or mistyped URLs to a landing page.
And, to add suspenders to your belt, make sure you've specified a catch-all address (and make sure to classify as much spam in that box as possible). That way, you're covered for any typos you haven't caught in the past or won't catch in the future.
Great tip. Thanks, Tim!
*** And, to add suspenders to your belt, ***
Great imagery there, Mr Gussett. Erm. :-)
Nice. How does that one rank on the corny-meter?
Monsoon's fault is that of naïveté. Gmail doesn't support all of the web standards that other browsers do, so HTML email won't always appear as intended. This is rather important to email marketers... a beautiful HTML email makes a great impression. Check out the Email Standards Project to see what clients step in line.
Couldn't agree more. While it may be easy to do basic HTML on webpages, it is a disaster on e-mail. Due to standards, most browsers parse html similarly. Unfortunately, e-mail lacks these standards.
You would think that the oldest killer app on the web would be easy to configure by now. All it essentially does is send text. But no....
Even tables don't solve the problem. Props to Yelp and other people (Scott) who are able to overcome the inadequacies of formatted e-mails.
It also doesn't help that MS decided that Outlook 2007 would take its HTML rendering engine from MS Word instead of Internet Explorer :/
Just a question though on including more, not less, images in your newsletters: does it not increase the chances of en email being flagged as spam?
That would really depend on the spam filter, and those vary quite a bit.
Sorry for the double-comment... did the blog go down just now?
Hey Tyssen,when trying to avoid being 'filtered' it’s also very important to maintain a good reputation (IP address or domain). ISPs are moving towards a reputation based filtering system vs content filtering. In our company we have a Reputation Manager who maintains close relationship with the biggest ISPs out there, to ensure we are whitelisted and our reputation is clean.
Cheers :)
I think it's best practice to remind yourself to think about customer/client benefits. In the B2B world, instead of just sharing company news, tell customers what the benefit of that news is to them. You may have a great new service you want to promote, but think about promoting it via a case study of how it's actually helped a client achieve a specific goal. You still get the news out, but you're focusing on how your newletter readers could stand to benefit from the service (instead of just focusing on how you'll benefit from the publicity).
Great points, and I think that's something you really need to keep in mind for a lot of things--landing pages, newsletters, email marketing campaigns, calls to action, etc.
... and sometimes it's important to think about whether you need a newsletter in the first place (speaking of my own personal experience, not SEOmoz). We've had a newsletter for years, but that coupled with our other publications (one of them being weekly) and emails blasts is dilluting our message. Signal to noise ratio is out of balance and we start having the "saying something just to be speaking" problem instead of speaking because we actually have something to say.
My tip is: If you find yourself trying to "fill a slot" in your newsletter or other publication too often, you may need to rethink a lot about what you're really trying to accomplish. And you have to be honest with yourself. Don't feel bad if your only goal is leads / sales and you're only adding other "fluff" to not seem like you wants leads and sales. You have not because you ask not ;) If you wants contacts, ask for them. Of course don't ignore best marketing practices... but you get my point by now in my ramblings I hope!
Very good point and probably the most important thing about email marketing.
I used to work for a company where we were definitely guilty of sending far too many emails. Whenever I tell someone where i used to work, they nearly always say - oh yeah, the guys who used to fill up my inbox.
No amount of design will stop people from deleting your emails if you send too many.
Good stuff. Lots in common with what you want in a blog post, don't you think?
I agree with all of your recommendations and would add some more:
9) paddings
seperate columns by whitespace so that they are clearly seperated
10) use clear call to actions
don't overdue it with links. if you look at the example of the smx-newsletter above, there are 11 links only in the main text, some of them I assume linking to the same site. I tend to use 1 clear call to action for every section of my newsletters.
P.S. SEOmoz is also guilty of #3 and #4... unfortunately.
P.S.S. How about a "SEOmoz Newsletter Design Competition"? I'd be up for that!
Thanks for your feedback--we're still trying to unearth the "magic formula" for our newsletters. A newsletter contest isn't a bad idea...I can ping Rand and Scott on it to see if they're interested.
Thankyou for an excellent article.
As others have commented - Well written and illustrated.
Fascinating
Great post Rebecca! ;)I think the power of email marketing is highly underestimated (unfortunately), that’s why we still see so many bad emails out there. Here is a fun Email Preview Pane Rendering Quiz for those wondering is your email format is effective:https://www.emaillabs.com/tools/email_preview_pane_quiz.html
Cheers
Rebecca, interesting post. You are true that the reach of the newsletter depends on all these points. I have also tried different methods and I find that clean and readable newsletters make a good impact and also having a 20% off by using a coupon code works well.
I appreciate if there has more posts about email marketing on moz.
Rebecca, a few comments to your post:
1. Regarding Obama's newsletter, how does it look like when you click - "Display images" at the top? It is always a dilemma if images should be attached or linked to the https:// location.
2. I'm disappointed how badly, in general newsletters are designed. For me, headers and images are really important when catching attention. I like this design (Polish website): https://www.echo.szczecin.pl/files/content/Image/newsletter(1).jpg
3. It will be worth if one of your technical guys could recommend some software to test emails on different platforms and if they are spam-proof.
There are still minimal images in Barack Obama's newsletters and emails, but sorry I forgot to expand it before taking the screenshot.
Newsletters are tough because even if you have a large amount of people signed up for them, its tough to tell who is actually reading them or gaining knowledge from them. I can't tell you how many times I've signed up for something in person to get a free t shirt or water bottle only to have them send me a newsletter that I never read. You make some great notes about formatting and I really believe if more newsletters concentrated on keeping their message short and sweet they would be more effective. I also find that the information in the subject line really dictates whether not I open it. If the message grabs my attention, I'm hooked. If it's long-winded and boring, straight for the trash.
Email newsletters are a very effective way for organizations to drive online traffic and to build branding. However, as Rebecca Kelley pointed out, there are many mistakes that companies make with their email newsletters that are holding them back from reaching their internet marketing potential. Kelley found numerous mistakes that organizations made in email newsletters recently. Her findings included outbound links that did not work, no professional layout, too chunky with text, not enough images, background colors that clashed with the text, spelling errors in the text and weak subject lines. Kelley also did a good job of showing email newsletters that got it right and were excellent. These good examples were visually stunning, easy to read and made the reader want to share the email online. Overall, these best email newsletter practices must be used by organizations everywhere.
Mr. Bruce Clay should really take a look at this post. To Bruce: You are great Bruce, but you just have really long newsletters that require a lot of motivation to read!
it is one of those post which atract you from your heart, you know your going to learn some thing by going through this post, i am about to design a newsletter for my new webiste and i was thinking to find out some good exaple for the newsletter you solve my problem, i like two newsletter screen shot very much and i think i will try to use one of them with some slight changings..i like SEMpdx newsletter design and yelp newsletter the one is with graphic
thanks once again
In addition to design issues and display of email html on different platforms there is another issue with email newsletters - deliverability. ISP spam filters are very sophisticated and will look at how well formated your html is, the ratio of text to images, and use of colors, font sizes, and punctuation. CSS is not a good option for email html. If you try to use a style sheet you must put it in the body of the html, not the header, as usually the header is stripped. In general, the cleaner html the better the deliverability. And then once it has been delivered it needs to look good!
Maybe a bit of an obvious one, but puleeezzzz remember to spell check your before you send it (not talking about SeoMoz here, just in general). I've lost count of the number of times i've received a newsletter littered with basic spelling errors. I had the misfortune of sending one out to customers in California and spelling San Jose wrong. D'oh!
Also, if you're using outbound links with variables in them to personalze the landing page, make sure to test it out thoroughly. From experience, sending a newsletter to a bunch of folks only to have none of the links work is cringe worthy to say the least.
I agree with you about the Yelp titles. I caught myself yesterday telling people about the titles of their newsletters. I received one from them couple days ago titled "Frojo like A Mofo" I was ROLFLMAO and I told 3 of my friends about it.
I also agree with Tim's points and feel a design contest for SEOmoz is worth a shot because I'm pretty sure Maven's landing page makeover increased conversions.
Ok, I'll throw a newsletter on the mercy of the court. In the interest of transparency, I do work with these guys, but I also happen to think they made a wicked newsletter.
What they did right was combine real web design talent with real journalism talent. The editor has a Masters in journalism I think. Regardless, the point is that I think many e-newsletter editors kind of hate their newsletters and their voracious appetite for content on an unforgiving schedule...and it often shows. Ever notice what passes for news on a quiet day at 2am on CNN?
Enough blather. I think the only Rebecca rule it breaks is length, and maybe it's a bit jammed, but what do you think?
https://www.cognos.com/newsletter/
Here are a couple screenshots of that newsletter in Safari:
https://mrgossett.com/screenshots/cognos_1024x768.png
https://mrgossett.com/screenshots/cognos_1994x1258.png
https://mrgossett.com/screenshots/cognos_in_Mail.png
The first is with the browser window sized to 1024x768 (my personal minimum supported resolution). Notice the horizontal scrollbar... there seems to be a minimum width set that is greater than 768. You can't rely on mail clients providing that much horizontal space. Like Rebecca's favorite newsletters, Cognos should use a fluid design that works well at smaller widths.
The second screenshot is maximized to fill my 1920x1200 screen. The background image in use (that vertical grey bar) should be set to repeat-y (vertically only). Like I just said, you can't rely on an email being displayed this wide, but what happens when it is? The easiest fix here is a max-width (or just remove the width="100%" on the top-most table, and it'll all shrink to fit... maybe add align="center" or style="margin:0 auto;" to center the table in the viewport).
The last screenshot is a what happens when I use Safari to mail the page to a friend. Notice the email, print, and "Digg it" buttons.
Cognos uses a different template for its general website, so this email newsletter must have been designed specifically for email. Cognos should probably create another design from the ground up, with attention paid to the remarks Rebecca made here.
Great feedback Tim. I looked at your shots and see what you mean. I'll pass your post to the editor. Afer cursing a lot, I bet he'll fix all of these issues. Thanks for taking the time to improve some anonymous dude's day.
Glad to help, Brian. Send me an email (or delight Jane and use SEOmoz's social network to private message me) if you or your developer have any questions. Also, point him toward the Email Standards Project.
I think this is a great post - actual screenshot examples of good and bad newsletter design/layout are very useful, rather than simply advising 'keep it simple', or whatever. Illustration is memorable, and helps make the point.
I've never seen these newsletters before, so it's good to get a bigger picture of what's going on out there as well as a mozzer's opinion of what's hot or not.
I also love the happy egg in the mac n cheee shot...
Nice post Rebecca; it's easy for many of us to forget what a powerful marketing tool emails can still be.
I was actually reading a newsletter today and when I clicked on the links got taken to a 404 page saying that the referral code was missing.
FAIL!
Really enjoyed this roundup, Rebecca & I agree with most of your synopses. Personally I find Obama's emails really annoying but mostly because they come too frequently. I suppose Axelrod & co. know what the magic formula is for how often to solicit donations though.
Spinning off a theme already developed by some of the earlier commenters, do you have any tips for ensuring emails will look more or less the same in a number of email programs (Outlook, OE, Eudora, Gmail, etc.)? Are there websites out there for email like BrowserShots / BrowsrCamp do for testing browser versions?
Good question - what I've found:
Litmus
https://litmusapp.com/
Costs:
free 1h pass to try out, 18$/24h, 55$/month
Supporting:
Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2002/XP, Outlook 2000, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Lotus Notes 8, Lotus Notes 7, Lotus Notes 6.5, Apple Mail 3, Apple Mail 2.1
Campaign Monitor:
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing/
Costs:
$5 per campaign plus 1 cent/recipient, Any campaigns you send to 5 or less people are free of charge.
Supports:
AOL 9, Lotus Notes, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Outlook Express 6, Outlook XP, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, AOL Web, Comcast, Earthlink, Gmail, Mail.com, MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Mail, Yahoo! Classic, Yahoo! Mail, and a bunch of mobile clients
Yeah, the downside to Obama's newsletters/emails (they're kind of more like emails) is that they do come very frequently, but I suppose it's expected considering all that's going on right now with the Democratic nomination.
Totally off-topic, but am I the only music nerd who would love it if it was this David Axelrod who was actually running Obama's campaign?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Axelrod_(musician)
(Straight link because we know how the Moz feel about links to Wikipedia!)
Great post! Very useful newsletter tips!