In this issue, we’re continuing our series on the reality of newsletter publishing with a checklist of steps that you should take, beginning immediately after you mail your newsletter.   

Okay, you’ve pushed the send button and you sit waiting, fingers crossed that something great will happen as a result of this mailing.  And you start to relax, because after all, you have weeks before your next issue mails, right? 

WRONG!  If you publish monthly or on any regular basis, you need to take off your editor’s hat and put on your analytical hat immediately after you hit the send button.  Now is the time to learn how to make the next issue better than ever, simply by following these steps:

1. Find out what your overall response is.  Like a traditional direct marketing program, you want to see what actually has been received so you have the best baseline for the measurement of your program.  After we send out an issue here at IMN, the first things we check are what has been delivered (and what has not), how many people opened our newsletter, and how many people came to our newsletter from outside sources, such as from our web site and/or referrals. We now have a basis from which we can do further analysis. 

2. Examine further what your overall deliverability rate is.  After we find out what’s been delivered in step one, we then explore the overall deliverability a little more by checking how many names bounced (for reasons such as bad email addresses, on vacation, full mail boxes, etc.), how many people asked to be removed, and how many names have been added.  The analytics of these first two steps can give you a high level picture of the performance of your newsletter and can be especially useful when compared with past issues.  A trend that goes up or down is a vital statistic that can tell you whether to repeat the good work you’re doing or to re-evaluate and see how you can make your program stronger.

3. Find out what the most popular articles were.  What captured your audience’s attention?  What kinds of topics are of the most interest?  Did you have a topic that you thought would be hot, but it bombed?  This step is a very important one for us and it’s where we learn about what’s important to you. For instance, this column typically scores in the top three of the most popular articles, so we know you’re interested in this type of information.  Articles on spam and RSS also draw a lot of interest, as do our “Tips from the Experts,” so we obviously will continue with those themes as well.  We do, however, get an occasional surprise as we test out new topics.  If it doesn’t score high in reader popularity, you can be sure we won’t include that topic in the future.

4. Dig, drill down, compare, trend…   We also drill down to see who is reading what, we compare this issue’s performance with past issues, and we analyze mailings within an issue to see how our customers’ behaviors may differ from those of our prospects. We also find out who’s been spending the most time with us both through time spent reports as well as through analyzing the number of unique and total clicks. All of this gives us the intelligence to…

5. Close the loop.  Okay, by now, if you’ve done all this research, your brain is probably swimming with little data facts.  Your next – and final – “after you mail” step is to figure out how you can put what you’ve learned to use in your next issue and each issue after that.  Some of the analysis you performed will give you very concrete direction for your next issue (like topics that out and out bombed) while other data may require further analysis and thought (like trends you see forming).  You may even have spotted some unique nuances that could lead to things like better list segmentation for groups of readers that prefer certain kinds of content to others.

The important thing is to select at least one or two things to take action on for your next issue.  At the same time, you’ll want to create a game plan for ongoing action items that you can continue to pursue while you get your next issue under way and that you can add to after your next issue mails. 

Nancy Langmeyer of The Write Words is a freelance writer and a key member of the IMN Newsletter Team.  Here is a library of Nancy’s Reality Marketing articles from past issues:

• strategy development
• team building
• editorial calendar development
• design elements
• creating content