How I Structure My Newsletter

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I recently asked for feedback on what could be improved in my newsletter. I had a bit of a chuckle when I got four responses about frequency and all four were different. One person wanted once per month, another every two weeks, another person was weekly, and finally a person wanted this email twice per week. I have a feeling somewhere in the middle of all that is where I’ll rest the frequency (2-3 times per month). I think that this will ultimately rest with value. Can I bring new and good value every few weeks? I believe so. Twice a week? Nope, unless I decided to shift to releasing serials.

What’s more interesting to me is the other feedback I received, both in the reports and in replies. My reports say that offering an “instant win” contest increases the amount of clicks in the email. That’s not a huge surprise. However, it also decreased the amount of unsubscribes (by about 3x), which is a surprise. The amount of opens was about the same as average.

The replies revealed a few things: people like cute animal photos (not a surprise) and that they want to hear more about the works in progress (which is a surprise). I was trying to keep my works in progress to just a couple paragraphs, perhaps a cover reveal. It sounds like they would also like quotes and perhaps a bit more.

The final interesting fact I learned is that cross-promotion to relevant freebies doesn’t frustrate the readers. I was worried they would find this “spammy”, but if it’s in the same category and has a theme… it seems to fit. For example, if you write fantasy, and find a free eBook promotion for Halloween fantasy books in October…they want to hear about that.

Overall, I think I may need to re-evaluate my original newsletter strategy. The whole focus was on separating audiences; one with cross-promotion, another with just promoting my works. It seems I can combine both of those in a single email, which means I shouldn’t be worrying as much. I still might keep these audiences separated, so that I can control the amount of cross-promotion a bit better. I also like the idea of being able to “trial and error” twice as fast with newsletter ideas. I also like being able to ask different questions in each mailing, which helps me focus in on what people want.

The current format I want to use is:

  • Say Hello (What’s in the email)
  • Cute animal photo
  • Audio Book Review Requests
  • Instant Win Contest
  • Works in Progress
  • Relevant Cross Promotion
  • Questions for the list (reply and let me know)


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