This was a practical workshop offered at the 2007 NTEN conference geared towards people already publishing e-newsletters. Below are highlighted some best practices and key do’s and don’ts.

Content Tips:

1. Give careful thought to your subject line. Too often we labor over the content of our e-newsletter and then rush to slap on a pro forma subject line that lacks interest. A good subject line is a critical element to getting people to open your email.
2. Exercise editorial control of content. Make clear upfront to your organization that while every department is welcome to submit content, the editor of the e-newsletter reserves the right to pick and choose what content will actually be included and which will be highlighted/featured. Give feedback to people whose content falls short and explain what they can do to improve chances of getting included in the e-newsletter.
3. Watch out for insider language, acronyms and jargon that will turn off people not that familiar with the issues you are featuring. Show the content to someone who is not part of your organization to see how understandable it is to them before publishing.
4. Investigate what is working. Study which parts of your website get the most clicks. Also compare “open” and “click through” rates for different issues of your e-newsletters and see if you can draw any conclsions. Or ask people to do a short online survey using “SurveyMonkey” to find out what they want to read about.

Design:

1. Keep your e-newsletter clean, organized but simple. Studies show that highly designed e-newsletter do not get read any more frequently than simply formatted ones. Given that the more images and formatting you have, the more chance there is for the content to get messed up by at least some of the ISPs out there.
2. Include a table of contents at the top with section anchors so that readers can quickly see what’s featured in the e-newsletter and jump. Or, you can try just featuring a couple of high priority items and then listing less “sexy” items in a sidebar list.
3. Use bold subheads so that each item stands out.
4. Links: (a) Don’t use the words ”Click Here” for link text. Actually give descriptive content to the link, like: “Read the XXX report now.” (b) Don’t make the link text too short (it can be hard for older folks to get on the link). but not make it so long that it becomes distracting; (c) It’s not a bad idea to have an important link at the beginning and the end of a newsletter item. Some people may be ready to click right after reading the heading; other will want to read the item first and then click the link.

Technical Tips:

1. If you make any major formatting changes to your newsletter or adopt a new hosted email tools, do a small test run to check out how the e-newsletter actually comes through.
2. Some email programs may garble your email and knock out images. To insure that the reader knows whom the e-newsletter is from, include your organization’s name as a regular text headline, not as an image, at the top. You can put your organization’s logo in next to it as a visual identifier, but this way you won’t have some recipients getting an email with a big, missing graphic at the top.
3. When you include an image in your e-newsletter, make sure to set a width property tag and an alt tag to identify the image. That way, if the image doesn’t come through, the reader can at least see that there was supposed to be a graphic there, and will be more likely to scroll down until the content of the message begins.
4. Learning to interpret sophisticated statistics provided by some email hosting companies is a complicated task. However, you can do some simple testing by splitting your email list in two and seeing whether a change in a particular element in your approach— like coming up with a jazzier subject line, or changing the day you send out the email, or focusing on a couple of items instead of a long list of items—and comparing the “open” and “click through” results.