The Newsletter remains a cornerstone of many organizations’ email marketing. Deservedly so – a newsletter is flexible enough to communicate anything important, and structured enough to be easy to write. It also carries an official connotation from the organization: subscribers who see “newsletter” anticipate that its contents are somewhere in the continuum between relevant and required reading.

For these reasons, we would all like our newsletters to be more widely read. Even if their open rates and clicks are already strong, the more people who read the organization’s official word, the easier it is to further the organization’s objectives. Here are seven ways to make this email staple work even harder:

1. Give it a name. Calling your newsletter “Newsletter” is certainly accurate, though it stops short of giving the subscription a personality. The name of the newsletter for the department of sanitation in my county is called “The Paperless Airplane.” If a newsletter about picking up trash and recycling can have a catchy moniker, so can yours.

2. Add a contextual subject line. Many newsletters are titled by date or issue with subject lines to match, such as “Association XYZ Newsletter: August 2010.” While it is true that this subject line convention relieves the author of the burden of decision-making, a subject line that telegraphs the newsletter content would likely lift open rates. Do a few issues of A/B testing with an option like “XYZ Newsletter 8/10: Annual Meeting Pics and Presentations.” Soon you will have a good sense of what types of content references in the subject line your newsletter audience finds most appealing.

3. Post your newsletter as a web version. Your newsletter subscribers (and others you would like to be your newsletter subscribers) also spend time on your website, so why not use the media there to promote a link to the web version of your newsletter? Pointing to the web version won’t require any additional layout of formatting work and allows you to still benefit from Real Magnet’s analytics. Promote the web version in a “What’s New” section on your homepage, on your blog, and through your social media channels as well to distribute your newsletter to the widest possible audience.

4. Post newsletter archives online. And now that you’re using the web version of your newsletter, why not create a simple page on your website that serves as an archive of your recent newsletters? Again, no additional publishing work for the newsletters themselves is necessary. All you need to do is include the links Real Magnet generates to the recent web versions you would like to include. Then in the newsletter itself, point your subscribers to your Newsletter Archive page so they can review previous newsletters whenever they like.

5. Add a new section. One of the advantages to newsletters is that they are easy to template. Each one can include the same categories of content, making them easy to write and predictable to your subscribers. But the downside of rigid templating is that it can fatigue over time and start to feel a little formulaic. Try interrupting your regularly scheduled newsletter with a fresh new section – one that is noticeably different from the rest of the newsletter so that it really stands out. Maybe it is a single industry-relevant data point conveyed in a brightly colored graphic. Or it is a comment or quotation from someone known within your industry. Maybe it is a photo from a recent industry event, identifying the subjects with a caption (people love to see pictures of each other and themselves). Many newsletters are all work. Think of this section as the whistle that goes along with it.

6. Launch a win-back program for the unengaged. You probably have many subscribers to your newsletter who have not opened it in the previous 6, 9 or even 12 issues. Continuing to send to them and hoping for an improvement is a scenario for disappointment. Instead, identify these subscribers through recpeient-level tracking and run a separate win-back campaign for them. The objective of the campaign is to target them separately with a message or offer that will re-engage them with the organization. If they read the message, click-through, interact with some content on the other side (such as a poll or a video or a photo gallery or a blog post), the connection between them and your organization will be rekindled, and they are more likely to see the next newsletter you send them as relevant to them. And when this happens, you’ve just earned yourself another newsletter reader.

7. Recruit more subscribers. We all know this, but we don’t always do everything we can to encourage more people to subscribe to our newsletters. Take an inventory of all the sources of your subscribers, then compare it to all the points of contact you have with people who should be your subscribers. If the lists don’t match up, you have just identified new places to add a mechanism for joining your list.

As an email marketer, I’m fond of case studies. I attend conferences to hear them, scour the trades to read them, and pick the brains of other email marketers to surreptitiously discover them. I feel pretty strongly that one of the best ways to get smart about email marketing and about how to use Real Magnet’s products is to learn how your contemporaries are doing it – within your industry and in others.

But the one way I know of to get even smarter about email marketing than reading case studies is to write them. The act of writing your own case study – about how and how effectively your organization uses email – brings clarity and candor to the practice and requires you to truthfully assess the discipline and strategy you bring to the practice. And the finished product – even if intended only for your internal colleagues’ eyes –  invites the constructive feedback of other stakeholders.

Why not try it? Follow these steps to create a case study of your own, and see if you don’t become your own best student in the process:

1. Define the scope of your case study. The narrower the better. As an email marketer you’d be less interested in a colleague presenting on “How we approach email marketing” than you would “A/B Testing for Open Rate Improvement” or “Mobile Subscription Channel Launch and Adoption.” Hidden in this step is the principal reason writing your own email case study is so valuable: in order to have a case study to write, you need to have initiatives within your email program worth chronicling. If the only case study topic you can come up with is “Lessons on Sending out a Lot of Emails and Hoping for the Best” then you’ve already learned something from this process that you might not pick up reading someone else’s case study.

2. Outline the success metrics. As you’re preparing to write your case study, include a list of all the metrics you decided previously to use in order to measure the success of your initiative. For example, if your case study is on “The Launch of a Niche Newsletter to a subset of our Subscriber Base,” your success metrics might include total subscribers by time, percent of house list who subscribers, percent of target niche who subscribes, as well as open-rate and click metrics from the niche newsletter compared to the primary. As above, it’s possible you might not have articulated the success metrics for your initiative at the outset of the initiative, so your case study work becomes a little retroactive. The act of writing the case study is a good reminder that these metrics are critical from the very beginning of a project, and should help you remember to define them proactively with your next case study worthy initiative.

3. Compile your data into tables and graphs. It’s useful to be able to say at a marketing meeting, “The open rate on our emails has been increasing.” But it’s much more insightful to show a table with the open rate by message over the past year. Better still, roll out a line graph charting the open rate from message to message so that it’s easier to isolate the changes and trace back their causes, and draw some conclusions about future trends as well. Visual representation of data does take some work, but is extremely powerful in communicating key findings and inviting productive feedback and follow-up questions. Inevitably, the marketer to glean the most from the graphs is the one who prepared them in the first place.

4. Reflect on what might have been. Now that you’ve compiled your data, made your charts and drawn your conclusions, step back and play a couple rounds of “what if?” Is there a conclusion you’d like to be able to draw but didn’t capture the necessary data in the process? Do ideas appear for how to improve the initiative itself next time based on the data and conclusions you’ve laid out? If you could start the whole thing all over again, what would you change? Include all this within your case study – in part to catalog some of the learning you’ve achieved merely by preparing the case study, and in part to set the course for the next email initiative or case study which will include these very improvements.

I note with some irony that I have never come across an online survey about the popularity of online surveys. But anecdotally I can certainly confirm that they’re past the gaining traction stage and have become an essential business tool for many companies. And why not? They are very easy to administer, provide instantaneous feedback, and can be employed across many different business application, from customer satisfaction to marketing intelligence to sales support.

Many Real Magnet clients are using surveys for these very purposes. Trade associations commonly send out annual or even quarterly member satisfaction surveys; publishers measure audience interests in advance of launching new publications or issuing free trial subscriptions; and surveys to measure feedback after conferences or webinars are nearly de rigueur at this point.

But there are some lesser-known, equally profitable uses of online surveys that businesses should consider, particularly if you’re already using Real Magnet for email. Here’s a start:

1. Voting and Elections. Board of Directors elections are an annual occurrence for trade associations, and Real Magnet’s Surveys Module is a perfect platform for them. Because it integrates seamlessly with Real Magnet, re-sending the ballot-survey to members who have not yet voted is easy. An example from a different industry is a major publisher, who uses online voting of magazine cover choices to its audience. A panel of its readers pick which cover they prefer and that’s what the magazine runs with. Voting can also be rolled out in more casual environments, such as a “photo of the year” or other applications which are more public expressions of preference and popularity than a controlled data-collection environment. For these informal uses, you can elect to publish the results of some questions in real-time, so respondents can see if their choice is winning.

2. Research. The challenge with most industry research is that most companies are happy to receive it and study the benchmarks, but are far less willing to actually contribute the data necessary to compile the research. This makes survey response rates extremely pivotal in research quality. And nobody understands response rates like email marketers. So why not treat your surveys in the same way you do your email campaigns? By building your research surveys through Real Magnet, you can track analytics in much the same way as you currently evaluate your email, and through the same familiar interface. You’ll know who has responded and who hasn’t, when responses come through, and also be able to drill down into the email response history of your research targets, to see if their email response history sheds some light on their reactions to surveys. If research is important to your organization – let alone your industry – apply the same rigor in conducting and analyzing the process as you do in your mission-critical email marketing.

3. Customer Engagement. Ultimately, surveys are a conversation. You ask questions; your customers or members respond. Getting them to leave comments on your blog or to retweet your news requires some initiative on their part, so it happens infrequently. But filling out a survey can be little more than following a link and clicking on some radio buttons or check boxes. To respondents, it feels a lot more like surfing than it does participating or actively voicing an opinion. But it breaks the seal, and does compel your audience to interact with you on some level. I like to include surveys as part of email winback campaigns, particularly very short ones that don’t include any open-ended questions or ask for personal information. If you have email subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked anything in a while, consider sending them a very brief survey asking for their opinion on a topic you believe is highly important to them. If it’s interesting and simple, you stand the greatest chance to get them to respond, which is the first step in winning them back and re-engaging them.

4. Customer Intelligence and Segmentation. The data most marketers examine from surveys are the answers that respondents provide. But if you think about your surveys as a measure of customer engagement (see #3), then who is responding is as telling as what they are saying. Wouldn’t it be valuable to know what 10% of your audience is the most connected to your organization? Look no further than the list of people who responded to your last online survey. They’ve taken action to provide you with feedback, which required effort on their part. Presumably the effort is worthwhile to them because they intend to continue their relationship with you. Regardless of what they say in the survey, the fact that they said anything is a powerful piece of customer intelligence. If you’ve conducted this survey through Real Magnet, it’s easy to move these respondents into their own group, and target them later with other high-engagement offers, such as Share-With-Your-Network (SWYN) campaigns, or special early registration offers for conferences and webinars.

5. Registrations and Sign-ups. At its core, our Surveys Module is a very robust forms platform that ports all collected information into a database Real Magnet clients are already familiar with. Click around your website and look at every other place you use forms – in particular those that collect data that doesn’t go into a central database, but instead drops it all into an email to someone (probably you) who has to manually input it into a spreadsheet. Would it make your life easier if some of those dropped data directly into the same database you use to generate email? For example, do you use a form to collect registration data for informal events like cocktail receptions? How do your members apply to be a part of committees? If you haven’t yet opened registration for your big conference, do you use a form to collect email addresses from people who want to be notified when they can sign up? All of this can be done with the Real Magnet Surveys Module, and the data you collect goes straight into the database you already use for email.

What would you like online surveys to help you with? Building stronger relationships with customers, collecting actionable insight, reducing your workload, or all of the above?

Previously I wrote on the first 5 Email Evolutions (and how to respond to them). Below are #6 – #10.

6. Subscribers are using inbox filters. Almost every major ISP (Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail) and client-side email applications (Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora) offers inbox filtering, and there are no shortage of tutorials and tips on how to set them up to manage inbound email. And by “manage” most tutorials mean something between “delay reading” to “mark for deletion.” The objective of filters for most subscribers is to group messages that require a similar mindset to approach. Some might set up a filter for all email from travel sites and airlines, so they have a starting point for planning a trip or looking for a promotion. Others might group together all messages that include a certain company name. There is no way of knowing if it benefits your organization to be included in a subscriber’s filter or not, since you’re not sure if the purpose of a filter is “ignore this” or “save this for later” or “ooh – this is hot hot hot!” But you might market differently if you knew your messages were being filtered out, and how. Survey your subscribers to see if and how they’re using filters, and consider what course of action makes the most sense. It may be that including a few choice keywords in your emails will get your messages into preferred filters, or changing your sender address might keep some emails out of less desirable filters. You might also conclude that teaching some subscribers how to set up a filter expressly for your company’s messages is worthwhile. Even if your messages aren’t always visible in the preview pane, your brand is front and center every time your subscriber checks mail.

7. Your brand’s relationship with your subscriber may have changed. You can think of half a dozen reasons why this may have happened: your subscriber may have changed jobs, might have already purchased the product you offer, might be in a different life stage and not currently in market for your company’s services, or might no longer do business with you or be a member of your organization. As your subscribers’ relationships with you change, so does their need for communications from you, and the perceived relevance of those communications. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it is happening or to whom, so the best way to manage evolving relationships is to let subscribers do it themselves. More often than not, a subscriber who is less engaged than before but still connected to your organization wants something in between “send me everything” and “unsubscribe.” They want to stay in touch, but maybe don’t want a steady drumbeat from you. Consider a “lite” subscription of your emails, and offer it to subscribers who have been with you for a while, but whose engagement has trailed off. Better to keep them in the fold than for them to reach a point of saturation and ultimately unsubscribe, even if it means finding their inbox only half or even a quarter of the time.

8. There is simply more email for your subscribers to get through. This is a little different from the Clutter I wrote about in #4. Clutter is a lot of stuff subscribers don’t want but still get. Here I’m talking about the increase in the amount of relevant communication that takes place through email. People use email more than they used to. We used it to keep in touch with our customers, our suppliers, our spouses, our parents, our college friends, our lawnmowing service and our kids’ teachers. We’re in it all the time, and there is a pressing need to “get through it.” Your objective is for your messages to be part of the group that has to be “gotten through” and not the “clutter” that subscribers work around. To get there, empathize with your subscribers. Focus less on everything you want to tell them, and more on how much they have time to read. Succinct, clear, relevant messages are more important than ever. Think about the state of your own inbox before you push a message into someone else’s.

9. Subscribers are always online. Finally – an evolution that actually creates an opportunity for email marketers, instead of another challenge. All of a sudden, sending messages in the evening, early morning and even on weekends begins to make sense. Your subscribers are online at all hours, so throw out your “best practices” of when to send and see if you can find new hot spots for capturing their attention.

10. Subscribers expect to communicate 2-ways. We have social media to thank for this evolution. We talk to our customers and expect them to listen. Now they talk to us and expect us to listen. That means that it’s time to lose the “do not reply” address and make it easy for your subscribers to turn your messages into a conversation. Isn’t that the whole point after all?

Keeping pace with all these changes may seem like a lost cause. But the reality is that you don’t have to keep pace to still come out ahead. Let me explain by way of anecdote:

A man is meeting his buddy at the trailhead in the woods, where the two of them plan to set out on a day long hike. His buddy looks down at the man’s feet and says, “Why are you wearing running shoes? We’re going for a hike in the woods.”

The man replies, “because there are bears in these woods.”

“Bears?!” his friend exclaims. “But you can’t outrun a bear. They can go like 30 miles per hour.”

The man looks down at his buddy’s feet, shod in heavy, rugged hiking boots. “Oh, it’s not the bear I have to outrun…”

You’re not going to outrun your subscribers. They’re too nimble and unpredictable. But if you’re resourceful, responsive and purposeful you’ll surely outpace your competitors, leaving you to hike on another day.

I began my career in email marketing in 1997. Email was novel and exciting, and consumers were genuinely interested to receive most messages. Many were even disappointed to open their inboxes and find them empty. If you weren’t lucky enough to ply your email trade back then, imagine what it would have been like for every one of your messages to be anticipated, and each of your subscribers to be grateful to hear from you.

Here are 10 of the more recent evolutions of email, along with tips for how we as email marketers should respond to them. How many are you already employing? How many can you implement quickly and see a lift right away?

1. Email addresses have matured. Hotmail launched in 1996. Yahoo! Mail was born in 1997. Some AOL addresses have been in use even longer. Some of  your subscribers addresses are 10 years old or older. Even gmail, the relative newcomer in the free inbox market, has been around since 2004. The longer your subscribers have had an email address, the more subscription lists their address appears on. That means more mature address are likely to receive more email. Conversely, older addresses may no longer be the preferred address and inboxes languish days, weeks, even months between openings. Either way, older email address are susceptible to lower open rates. Pay attention to your lag metrics and open rates for subscribers with these ISPs to see if a campaign asking for a fresher address makes sense. You want your messages to land in the most-favored inbox, not the one nearing retirement.

2. Image loading is often disabled. Some studies have found that as many as 50% of email messages reach inboxes with their image loading disabled. That means that these subscribers only see the text, and miss any promotional copy or offer that is part of a graphic in your email. If your messages are graphics heavy, make sure that your message appears in the copy as well. It may seem redundant to the subscribers who see both the images and the copy, but at least you’ll ensure that everyone who opens clearly reads your call to action.

3. More messages are read on mobile devices. Some smart phones will render your messages pretty well, making them as readable on a mobile device as they are on a computer. But that isn’t always the case, so make sure your messages are ready for reading even when picked up on the go. Keep an eye on your “view the web version” links: often mobile users unable to read messages on their phone will follow this link and use their phone’s browser instead. If you find many of your subscribers are viewing via mobile, maybe it’s time also to add SMS messaging.

4. Inboxes are more cluttered. The good news is that email has lost none of its relevance as a critical communications channel. The bad news is that every single company knows this, and works very hard to make sure their messages are in your subscribers’ inboxes as well. What to do? Augment your use of email with other channels of customer contact, like social media, direct mail, SMS, fax and advertising. The more relevant your brand is to your subscribers outside of the inbox, the more likely your emails will rise above the din in the inbox.

5. That darn Facebook made privacy concerns a headline again. Over the past five years, the biggest change I’ve seen in consumer behavior online is the rise in expectations of consumer control. More than ever, your subscribers want to govern what they consume and when they consume it, whether it’s TV on-demand or through a DVR, or limiting access to their inbox. I’m convinced that resistance to this movement is futile. Now is the time to cede control to your subscribers through a preferences center. Let them choose which messages to receive, and which to opt-out from. It may mean tweaking your content strategy a bit so that you don’t have an all-or-nothing approach, but it will be well worth the effort. The size of your list is no longer a meaningful metric. Allowing your subscribers to self-segment may mean fewer recipients for each messages, but should yield a greater overall ROI to your email program.

Evolutions 6-10 are coming up soon in Part 2.

I’ve written before about optimizing email. In fact, that’s almost all I write about here – ways to pump up your results through better subject lines, more targeted content strategies, list management, A/B testing and other tactics. Many of the features and reports you need to improve your email results are already built into the Real Magnet application.

Some are not, though I maintain that it’s not our fault. There are ways of improving your email program that have nothing to do with the act of composing and distributing email itself, but rely instead on activities that take place before and after the email process. Let’s call it extra-email optimization, or optimization of email that takes place outside of email. When we focus on our email metrics, it’s easy to get a little bit myopic. When we look at click-through rate, for example, we aren’t so concerned with how many people click through our messages as we are how many are then in a position to register for our conference, or who then generate page views and ad impressions on our website. Your emails are not by themselves an initative; they’re a tool for driving a larger company objective.

Your email, then, better achieves your organization’s objectives if:

- More people subscribe to it
- Your subscribers are more inclined to open and act on your emails
- If they complete whatever action the click-through encourages them to take

None of this happens within the email itself. But the success of your emails can be heavily influenced by optimizing each of these steps with your email program in mind. Here’s how:

More subscribers: Are you doing everything you can to grow your list, by allowing people to opt in when registering for your conference, downloading white papers on your site or making online purchases? Is it easy to join your list in the “Contact Us” and/or “About Us” section of your website? Have you used your social channels to promote your newsletter and other email subscriptions? What about your physical presence – do you collect email addresses at storefronts, trade shows and other places where you exist in the real world? Be resourceful and vigilant in your recruitment efforts. Every minute of resources you put into composing and distributing your emails is amplified by each additional subscriber you have.

Greater inclination to open and act on messages: This isn’t about sending more interesting or targeted messages. Rather, it’s about anticipation. Your subscribers need to expect and even look forward to your messages. With the rise in email volume over the past few years, anticipation has become one of the most challenging elements of email marketing. Certainly improved targeting of messages and list hygiene helps, but I’m a strong believer that your organization’s relationship with your subscribers outside of the inbox can yield the greatest lift. I’ve written about email in the marketing mix previously, and anticipation is where it pays off in spades. The more you are in your subscribers’ lives – via social channels or on the phone or in person or via direct mail – the more relevant your brand becomes. Relevancy begets anticipation. Your email program will work better if you supplement it with other points of customer contact.

Post-click-through action: Fire up your website analytic engine. It’s time to take a look at your landing pages, and how well they’re performing. You’re already testing different elements of your email to see what works better – this subject line, that layout, those links. Do you do the same thing with what happens on the other side of the click-through? Do you know, for example, if your conference marketing emails drive more registrations by driving your email subscribers to the conference main page, the agenda, or the registration page? Do you see deeper engagement if you drop your subscribers off on your homepage, or deliver them deeper into your website? Independent of your email, have you put resources into merchandising your content effectively, usability testing, or shopping cart / checkout optimization? Online retailers live and breathe for these tactics, and other business can learn a lot from their best practices. Think about it: if you’re trying to drive a webinar registration or encourage someone to sign up for your premium online content or services, you’re in the e-commerce business too. And even if you’re not competing with Amazon.com, your customers have had their expectations on usability and checkout set there.

Next time you see a meeting invite for a project at your company that iss outside of the scope of email marketing, think about it in this new context. Giving email a seat in that conference room could mean more subscribers, greater anticipation, and improved results.