Newsletter Optimization Help - Anyone know someone?
-
Hi Moz'ers!
I am looking for some help and possibly a referral. My organization has a massive newsletter, 180k subscribers but the performance of the newsletter has been decreasing over the past couple of years with a really poor CTR. I am looking for someone to help optimize and provide recommendation on how we can better the newsletter performance again.
We are in the international education and travel business, primary audience is college students within the US/UK/AUS.
If anyone has a recommendation of an agency or consultant specializing in newsletters optimization, that would be amaze-balls!
-
Some good responses already. I would add that if you're not already segmenting your audience then you definitely should be to make sure you're measuring the 'real' performance. For example, if in your 180k subscriber list, you have 90k people who haven't placed an order in 90 days and 10k customers who order with you every month then your open rates within the 'engaged' proportion of users will be swamped by the staleness of the rest of the list. Subscriber lists grow with growing businesses, and naturally develop dead wood so churning out the same sorts of emails means the stats can gradually over time decline.
You can combat this by (very simply) segmenting your 'active' base from your inactive base - by all means send them the same email but track their stats separately. Then when you start to invest in your emails, you'll be able to see if your active base are affected, rather than them all being lumped together with any increases/decreases in the performance of key sections of your customer base being concealed.
Finally in terms of email performance, I would use CTR/open rate purely as informative, because really it's revenue and margin that matter to the business.
-
Mr Freedman makes some great points. Typically short and sweet is a more ideal approach. Sometimes timing and day of the week can have a dramatic effect as well. What are you typical CTA's and how clear is that action point? I might suggest Litmus if you are not already using it. We have found that handcoding responsive emails and running it through Litmus gives us a decent bump.
-
The most common mistakes:
- Too many links
- Too many items -- overall length is too long
Therefore:
- **Lack of focus **
In most cases there should be a single, clear call to action....but it can be included two or three times.
I've seen all too many newsletters that bury the call to action as the 18th of 24 links!
If there is great and useful content, it might be wiser to send shorter but more frequent newsletters. Some should have no specific product plugs...just great info. Counter-intuitive, I know!
If the audience is college students, you might want to consider embedding 60-seond videos videos.
I have quite a bit of experience in travel and education and would be happy to talk to you offline.
-
You are very correct! Thanks for the suggestion and I just added!
-
If I were to make a suggestion, you might mention what industry they are in. I know a lot of us SEO / Marketing people have industries that we are better in than others.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My website was at the top of Google search for some years... suddenly I almost can't reach first page! Moz ranks my website better than the competitors... what might be going one? Could anybody help me out? Thanks!
Hello Guys! My website was at the top of Google search for some years... suddenly I almost can't reach first page! Moz ranks my website better than the competitors... what might be going one? Could anybody help me out? Moz rank us grade A... the competitors B or C .. I think we have better back links than they do... Would you need any kind of data or report to help me here? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | wesleyms0 -
Why would someone go to same 404 page over and over?
Good morning, I've been using the redirection plugin on my wordpress site and noticed i have multiple IP addresses going to the same folder on my site - like "mydomain.com/folder-name/". The "folder-name" is obviously not anything remotely like any folder or file name I have on my domain - so it's obviously spammy in nature. And, there are multiple IP addresses going to this same URL address every 3 hours on the dot, so it's appears automated. Is this something to be concerned about? Should I "do" anything? Thanks in advance for reading and replying!
Moz Pro | | mlm120 -
New to Moz and wanted a bit of help with my report
Hi, I have used the MOZ report to analyse one of my friends sites and I wanted to query a few warnings it highlighted and I just wanted people's thought on how important they thought these were: The first is dupliate descriptions/titles. This is mainly down the e-commerce pages. Fist duplicate content:
Moz Pro | | dannylancs
On some pages the description is identical and all that is different is the title and picture, is this an issue? Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages? Also regarding the canonical tag, they have put link rel="canonical" on every page and got it to point at itself, so not really being used in the way it is meant to be. Could something like this cause any harm? The final thing is internal linking back to the homepage. If for example the homepage is http://www.test.com, when linking back is it best to put the full URL over "index.html" even though they are the same page? Any help really appreciated Dan0 -
Can someone explain the attached on page error message?
Two weeks ago, I took down our mobile site and switched to one on dudamobile. However, for some reason, I keep getting this error/improvement message on my on page report. I do not see how I can have a cannocial problem with a page that is no longer there. Can someone explain that and what I can do about it? Thanks! eQTNRD6.png
Moz Pro | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Does Anyone Know The Moz Analytics Release Date?
I know it's coming soon, but does anyone know the actual release date for Moz Analytics? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | eglassman0 -
What is the difference between the Rank Tracker and the On-page Optimization page?
Both of them track keywords. In the Rank Tracker, you add each keyword manually and you associate it with a URL. For On-page Optimization page, the URLs are generated automatically based on searches and traffic?
Moz Pro | | ehabd0 -
SEOmoz showing crawl errors but webmastertools says no errors, need help!
Hi this is my first question and i couldnt find a similar question on here. basically i have a clients website that is showing 150 duplicate page titles and content errors plus others. SEOmoz analysis is showing me for example is 3 duplicate hompage URLS: 1.www.domain.com 2.domain.com 3.www.domain.com/index.html all 3 are the same page. after explaining to the guy (who built the website) the errors, he ensured me that the main URL is URl 1. and the other 2 are 301 redirects. however SEOmoz analysis doesnt seem to change the results and webmastertools doesnt seem to show any errors at all. also if i try all 3 URL's there are no redirects to URL 1. any help or clarity would be awesome! Thanks e-bob
Moz Pro | | bobsnowzell0 -
Keywords Best Practices for On-Page Optimization
Hi guys, we've successfully optimized our home page such that it receives a Grade A for 3 completely different, high traffic keywords. Looking forward to seeing the results! The keywords in question were identified by using the monthly searches reported from the Google Keyword Tool. For one of the keywords, the Google Keyword Tool differentiates between what I thought would be seen as being the same. For example, let's say Google reports these three keywords as high traffic keywords: tea cup
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
tea cups
the tea cup Using the On-Page Report Card, we get a Grade A for 'tea cup', but we get an F for the other 2 terms! I thought Google searches didn't really care about the plural form or adding the word 'the' in front. How should we interpret the result from the On-Page Report Card for the plural form of the keyword and with the word 'the' added in front? Would you track all 3 instances of the keyword independtly in your campaign, or would you just track 'tea cup'? Thanks!0