Testing our first newsletter
We sent out our first newsletter a week ago and found out a couple of interesting things worth sharing. You can still see our newsletter if you didn’t receive it.
To remind you, it basically contained short summaries and links to some of the content we have produced since we launched the business 6 weeks ago.
Make unsubscribing easy
The list of people we sent our newsletter to is entirely made up of people that either myself, Mark or Jon are connected to on LinkedIn. We’ve been using LinkedIn for a long time now which means some of those connections were formed quite some time ago.
So we wanted to be sure that people were happy to hear from us. To do that we wrote the introduction to make it clear who we were and that unsubscribing was easy:
“We’re emailing you because either Mark, Cam or Jon is connected to you on LinkedIn. We measure the success of what we do by quality not quantity, this newsletter is no different.
If you prefer not to receive these messages we’ve made unsubscribing easy:
Making it personal
We used MailChimp which makes A/B testing content fairly straight-forward. At first we discussed changing the content of the newsletter itself (mainly focusing on tone of voice). But we decided it would be better on our first newsletter to understand the importance of the subject heading, and so tested that first.
We wrote one heading that was personal, one that tried to summarise the email, and one that took one of the best performing article titles we have so far which is called The Amazing Terrible Product written by our Design Director Mark Goodard.
As you can see, the personal approach was not only the best from an open rate perspective but also from a click rate point of view. I think this is what we were all hoping would be the case but you never know.
Also, with this being our first newsletter there is a chance that the results might be unique e.g. people may be more inclined to open a newsletter with our names (which they know) rather than a brand (which most people are only now being exposed to).
Summary
It was rewarding to see that our own names not only served as a better reason to open the newsletter but also represented the content within it well enough to encourage people to click through and view more on our site.
Creating the newsletter was a fun collaborative task in of itself, and the level of interest in Paper it generated has led to some exciting opportunities.
Now we just need to come up with an even better newsletter next month. The difficult second album.