3 PracticesThat Are DestroyingYour Newsletter

A newsletter is easily one of the most important parts of an online business, as it is the most efficient and powerful way of increasing exposure and sales. However, there are marketers who find success only in the beginning, before finding out that their subscriber list has eventually decayed and stopped being beneficial to their business. What they don’t know is that there are 3 things that could creep up on your operations and slowly kill your newsletter if left unchecked. These 3 things consist of:

Lack of Opportunity to Grow the List From Within the Newsletter

List decay is a sad but unavoidable part of any newsletter. You can’t keep every single one of your subscribers indefinitely – over time some of them will lose interest, some will move on to a competitor, or some will pass away.

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The important thing is you need to find ways to continue adding new subscribers, and you can’t depend on a single venue for recruitment so don’t rest on your laurels just because you have a decent-performing opt in page. You also need to add ways to subscribe from within the newsletter itself, this could be a simple sign up link + Forward This link combo.

Failure to take advantage of a good newsletter’s tendency to get forwarded and passed around can lead to list decay, especially if your opt-in page is equally neglected just because “it’s working fine.”

Lack of Incentive

It is a good idea to always remember that your readers are giving you their precious time and attention if they open and read your newsletter, when they could delete and block you from ever appearing in their inbox with just a couple of mouseclicks. Therefore, you need to always provide an incentive to open the newsletter.

Now, don’t think “incentive” automatically means promo codes or giveaways – in fact, that kind of thinking is one of the things that will slowly kill your newsletter. It’s not always about money or tangible rewards. There are people who actively distrust contests and giveaways.

Incentive can also be good content. People will feel compelled to open your email and wait for its arrival if they know they can read something really good or valuable. Basically, make sure your readers get the feeling that they’re getting something else from your newsletter besides sales pitches and advertisements.

Last But Not the Least, Annoying Advertisements

Do you know the reason why e-mail newsletters are more powerful than website banners and pop-ups? It’s because people find website banners and pop ups as annoying forms of advertising. Both are unwanted. So in your newsletter, make sure your advertisements are not annoying. Avoid ads that take up more space than the content, ads that make it hard to scroll, and ads for products and services that are obviously not worth buying.

Don’t misunderstand this as a suggestion that you need to do away with advertisements altogether, far from it. Just make sure the advertisements you allow in do not detract from the content, and make sure you’re not hawking obvious cash-grab products and services. How do you know if it is? Simple – imagine that you have the same needs as your reader. Then think if you’re willing to buy whatever is on the ad if you had the money+. If the answer is anything but yes, then you need to let go of that ad.

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