Overview:
The ABCD model emphasizes four key components: Audience, Brand, Content, and Design. 'Audience' involves understanding and segmenting the target readership to tailor content effectively. 'Brand' focuses on establishing a consistent voice and visual identity that resonates with readers. 'Content' highlights the importance of delivering valuable and relevant information to maintain engagement. Lastly, 'Design' underscores the need for visually appealing and accessible layouts to enhance user experience
A newsletter is one of the best ways to reach your audience on a regular basis. Through a newsletter, you can share daily or weekly news, communicate your priorities and make yourself accessible to your readers. A newsletter is a prime way to engage with readers both before they become members — sharing your value to the community — and after they become members — continuing to offer quality content as well as member perks.
Let’s get started. Here are a few elements to consider when launching or evaluating a newsletter.
A: Audience
B: Build
C: Content
D: Data
A: Audience
Likely, your audience already subscribes to many newsletters. So how will your newsletter stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes? What will make your audience open and read your newsletter?
- First, determine who your audience is. What demographics may be useful to know (location, age, education level)? How do they read newsletters (desktop, mobile)? What do they come to your publication for (news, entertainment, events)?
- Next, consider what unique content or product you bring to your audience. What makes your newsroom different from any other newsroom in your region? What makes your daily or weekly newsletter different from other newsletters they might subscribe to? Showcase that.
- Ask your readers what they want. If you already have newsletter subscribers, survey them to see what content they want to read and what content they could do without. Ask them what new content they may want and what other features they’d like to see.
Use Google Analytics and social media engagement metrics to look for over-performing content areas. Is your audience particularly interested in stories on new businesses and community growth and development, events/entertainment content or recent obituaries? Newsletters tied to a specific topic area could have a small but engaged audience who would like to hear from you.
If you’re launching a new newsletter, you can use A/B testing to try new ideas, like newsletter names, element locations, and personalization. Test your content for three months, then survey your subscribers to see what’s working and what isn’t. But more on that later!
B: Build
Whether you are creating a new newsletter or auditing a current newsletter, it’s always a good time to reevaluate the build of your newsletter template.
- Are you or the newsletter editor trained on how to not only use, but troubleshoot, the newsletter template? What skills would someone need to use your template? Consider your capacity and that of a back up, should you need one. (And you will!)
- Similarly, how does this newsletter fit into your organizational workflow? Are there ways to streamline or automate your newsletter? Think about who will write, create, edit and send the newsletter, and who you’ll need buy-in from to get the newsletter off the ground.
- Does your newsletter have a logo? If it does, or if you’re using your newsroom logo or an image, it should be clear and on brand for your newsroom. Its height should be no more than 300. (The optimal image size in ActiveCampaign is 600×300.) The height is constrained because your readers should be able to start reading your newsletter content without having to scroll (i.e. the image is “above the fold”). And always make sure to check how the image resizes on mobile!
- Audit your template for accessibility:
- Is your font size at least 14 and left-aligned, with links underlined and colored, bolded or highlighted? Fonts should be no smaller than size 14 and ideally should be size 16 or more. Absolutely avoid center-alignment for more than seven lines of text.
- Is your font legible and spaced appropriately? Choose a font that is easy to read and visually spacious, not dense, when it comes to line heights and paragraph breaks. That space improves legibility and makes it more skimmable, and less overwhelming. Bold text that you want to stand out to make your copy easy to scan.
- Do you have plain text enabled? Be sure to provide other options than just reading the campaign in an inbox.
- Do images have alt text, or alternative text, for screen readers? A screen reader is a device used to read an email out loud, and each image in a campaign should include alt text that describes the image. Include a period after your alt text so the screen reader will pause before it moves on to the next section.
- If your newsletter is editorial, determine the voice your author will use in the copy. What will be the author’s signoff? Will you include a headshot? These are great personal touches that can help develop connection.
- When will you send your newsletter? Specifically, what day and time will it go out? Newsletter content can lend itself to a specific timeframe, like a morning recap of yesterday’s news, a Friday roundup of weekend events, or an evening summary of the day’s news so far.
If your newsletter isn’t tied to a timeframe, try a few days and time and compare open rates, or look at industry averages. There’s no real consensus on the best time to send a newsletter — it depends on your audience! — but tried and true timeframes include:
- Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday: 6-8 a.m. for morning roundups, 10 a.m.-noon, 3 p.m., 5-6 p.m. for the post-work crowd
- Saturday and Sunday: morning
Remember, newsletter templates are flexible and can evolve as your audience grows and as you determine what works best for your audience.
C: Content
So you’ve considered who your audience is and how you’ll create a newsletter to reach them. Now, what will your newsletter focus on?
How does this content relate to your other content
Daily newsletter: A daily newsletter can be curated by an editor or pulled from an RSS feed. A curated newsletter entails an editor choosing the most significant news stories of the day and inserting them into a template. An RSS feed newsletter uses the code from your website to pull into stories, images and links to your template.
Weekly newsletter: A weekly newsletter can be a roundup of all news verticals or focus on one vertical (e.g. all economic news from one week). A roundup newsletter is a great way to introduce your audience to all that your newsroom has to offer.
A focused newsletter is another way to engage your readers on a topic you already know they’re interested in, making it easier for your readers to access — and not miss! — any of the stories in that particular vertical.
Events newsletter: If your newsroom hosts events, partners on events or writes events-related content, an events newsletter can be used to send that information to your readers, further engaging them not only via email, but potentially across event registrations. An events newsletter should include a forward to a friend option so readers can quickly share event details, as well as a simple sign up link for those friends to subscribe themselves.
Limited-run newsletter: The opportunities for limited-run newsletters are endless. Use a limited-run newsletter during election season, throughout an awards season or to share a series of investigative pieces. When you launch a limited-run newsletter, be sure to let your audience know how long your newsletter will run and what they can expect from the newsletter. Conclude your limited-run newsletter with a survey to gather impressions from your subscribers.
What else? What other content does your newsroom cover that you want to send directly to your audience? For example, do you have an audio element like a streaming newscast or a podcast?
A few other notes on content:
Subject lines: Subject lines should be concise and convincing. This is what people will open your newsletter based on. For a regular newsletter, you can keep it simple: xxx Weekly Newsletter or xxx Weekly. Of course, you can get more creative if you want to! If you have capacity, a new subject line crafted for each newsletter, that teases the content inside, is sure to garner a higher open rate. Either way, keep your subject line consistent across all issues.
When you’re starting out — or when you’re evaluating your newsletter down the line — you can use A/B testing to see how subject lines perform in inboxes.
Use no more than 60 characters in your subject line — 40-50 is ideal. Most email clients will cut off after 60 characters (if not before).
Preview text: Think of this as the teaser for your email. Preview text can be longer than a subject line. A quote from one of the articles inside the newsletter is a good use of the preview text.
Use 90-100 characters in your preview text. Mobile clients will pull in about 50 characters; desktop clients will include more characters.
Learn more about preview text from Active Campaign.
Sender: Who will the newsletter send from: a reporter, editor or another member of your team? If the newsletter is not sending from a specific person, set up an email address for the newsletter: hello@xxx
Personalize: Use subscriber data to personalize your newsletter with a custom greeting. Perhaps include a note mentioning how long the subscriber has been reading your newsletter. Use the data however you choose to customize your subscriber’s experience.
Emojis: Yes, use them. Show that a real person is writing the newsletter!
D: Data
Now that you have your newsletter, you’ll want to keep track of how it’s doing. No one wants to send a carefully crafted newsletter into a void! Measure your newsletters across specific metrics throughout the year to understand where they are performing well and where they could be improved.
First, decide what metrics you will track.
Open rates are a common newsletter metric that will show the percentage of your subscribers who open each newsletter. They are a good measure of the effectiveness of your subject line.
Click-through-rates further show the engagement of your subscribers by identifying what percentage of your subscribers are clicking on a link in your newsletter.
Unsubscribe rates show the percentage of your subscribers unsubscribing from your newsletter.
Together, these three rates are the prime newsletter metrics. However, you can also measure newsletter growth (subscribers over time), bounce rate (to determine if people are subscribing to your newsletter with bad email addresses), and conversion rates (how many people are converting from your newsletter, e.g. becoming a member, purchasing a subscription or registering for an event). At BlueLena, we often create advanced metrics, like readers who have opened in the last 30 days.
Next, decide how frequently you will evaluate your metrics: monthly, quarterly or annually — or all three. If you’re launching a new newsletter, set a baseline for what you want success to look like in three months and in six months. Consider your current audience size, the size of any other newsletters you send and how widely you’ll promote your new newsletter.
If you meet those goals, great work! Celebrate your accomplishment, then keep tracking your progress as you move forward.
If you don’t meet those goals, reevaluate: is this newsletter accomplishing what you set out to achieve? If your metrics are close to goal or improving, consider doing another round of marketing promotion, asking current subscribers to forward to a friend and/or including sign up as the main option on your registration page. And ask your readers: what do they think could be improved about your newsletter? Implement trackable changes and set new goals.
Do you have more questions about newsletter best practices, or are you interested in evaluating how your newsletter could be improved? Connect with us at support@bluelena.io.
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Additional Notes:
- Add CTA buttons in your newsletter to encourage readers to become paying members, subscribers, or donors. Check out our CTA best practices for more information.
- Once you have your newsletter set up, you’ll want to attract readers. Learn about best practices for landing pages.
About BlueLena
BlueLena is a strategy consulting and audience management platform founded in 2020 to support the sustainability of independent local media. By combining cutting-edge technology with expert-driven services, BlueLena helps over 250 news organizations across North America develop and manage subscription, membership, and donation models. Its unique shared-resource management approach provides publishers, regardless of size, with access to enterprise-level tools and personalized support, enabling them to focus on high-quality journalism while building loyal, revenue-generating audiences.
BlueLena is majority employee-owned, and backed by investors including Automattic(the parent company of WordPress), the Local Media Association, and Old Town Media.