It’s now been four months since we began our electronic newsletter promotion – asking folks when they register or re-register if they want our electronic newsletter.
In four months we’ve gone from around 60 subscribers to over 500, so in terms of raw numbers, I’m happy. As I’ve said before, however, I can’t budge the percentage of newsletters opened from it’s 30% mark. I’m happy that this means we’ve grown from 20 viewers a month to 150, but we can do better.
We put the newsletter together quickly when we subscribed to nextReads a year or so ago. It’s time for a change, and I think the best way to make that change successful is to reach out to our users.
Here’s the plan: in early October, we’ll send a personalized email to about a third of our subscribers (yes, about 200 of them!) asking for their opinions about our newsletter’s look and content. Not a real survey, nothing structured, I just want impressions. Then our PR person, our head of reference, one of our staff with a great visual eye, and I will sit down and brainstorm, with the help of those impressions, what story we’re trying to tell with this newsletter. We’ll select new images for the header and rethink the formatting. After we’ve come up with two or three prototypes, I’ll go back to our subscribers and see if there’s any consensus on what users like best. Then we’ll revamp and see what happens!
This will be interesting for a number of reasons: I’m interested in seeing what percentage response a personal email asking for opinions will receive. I didn’t do very well recently when I asked our downloadable audiobooks users about their impressions, but I have in the past, so I’m not giving up hope. I’m interested in what people have to say, most of all. And I’ll be interested in seeing if a revamp based on user opinions actually improves readership rates.
I’ll be sending my email in early October, and giving people until mid-October to respond. More then….
Marketing In Libraries 
September 28, 2008 at 12:09 am
Interesting. I’d like to hear how any changes pan out…
One other approach that may work is to divide your subscribers up into groups and send out different prototypes to each group and track the results. Once you get a winning combination of content/format then it should be pretty clear by the number of folks responding. You could also keep this testing and evaluation cycle going on a continual basis.
October 7, 2008 at 11:28 am
Mark,
Good point, but right now my universe is only about 550 people! Somewhere I’ve got that a 10% response rate is great, so that means I have to send out a few hundred requests just to get 20 or so, so I think I’ve only got one shot 🙂 I’m going to record the results here, though, because I think we need to share more of this kind of information so we all have a better idea what to expect when we try to conduct surveys.
Alexandria