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June 24, 2004

Welcome Back, Gmail, Email Newsletter Audits and Developing an Email Newsletter from Scratch
by Jeanne S. Jennings

First off, welcome back! I'd taken an unplanned hiatus from The Jennings Report for a few months, due to an increase in work from my consulting business, but now I'm back and planning to publish at least once a month. I hope that your businesses were (and continue to be) as busy as mine.

Gmail
Gmail has been a big e-mail story since April Fool's Day when Google announced it. I was lucky enough to get an invitation to set up an account, which I've done. I haven't had much time to play with it yet; I'm just starting to 'test drive' it and see how it handles.

I like the hype; being someone who for years has paid for extra storage on a Yahoo account (dating back to 2000; we used the account to gauge deliverability of our 170+ e-mail newsletters to Yahoo when I was Director of Email Product Development at Reed Business Information US, formerly Cahners Business Information), I love the 'never have to delete a message' flexibility that more storage provides.

Besides that, I'm curious to see how they will place ads in my e-mails and I'm anxious to try out their new 'non-folders' system for organizing messages. One thing that surprised me a bit -- the look and feel, as well as the set-up, is very similar to Yahoo and Hotmail. I guess there are only so many ways to design an e-mail interface, but part of me expected it to be different. Oh well.

If you're on Gmail, send me your address and let's test drive it together. Aside from personal interest I'm looking at what this might mean professionally for my clients' e-mail marketing. Speaking of which: Janet Roberts, editor of EmailSherpa, is including a 'Gmail Watch' in her blog; the focus is on what Gmail means for marketers and what the other e-mail services are doing to compete.

Email Newsletter Audits
One of the things I've been doing a lot of are audits -- looking at existing e-mail newsletters and helping their publishers optimize revenue, list growth, open rates, etc. depending on their business goals.

I like it because it's really a mix of art and science; I take a very quantitative approach, pulling all the metrics and benchmarks I can, to identify areas of opportunity. Then we look at qualitative ways to boost performance. It's the perfect mix for my dual personality, MBA-spreadsheet geek meets creative director.

One surprise -- how few e-mail newsletters still don't track opens and click-throughs, let alone delivery and sales. Metrics are the best way to get insight in how your readers are (or aren't) using your e-mail newsletter; any measures you take without metrics to back them up are really a shot in the dark. You can put in place generally agreed upon standards and best practices, but you can't truly pinpoint a problem area and then measure your improvement.

My advice: if you're not tracking now, look into it. Even very cost-effective ($30 a month) e-mail services (I used to use MailerMailer and have just switched to Constant Contact, both of which I recommend) offer detailed tracking and reporting. 

Developing an Email Newsletter from Scratch
Speaking of e-mail newsletters, I've also been developing one from scratch for a B2B client. We did it right -- target market analysis, competitive overview, marketing plan -- all with the goal of giving it away for free to build their brand name and market their products and services. It should launch next month (July) and I'm very excited about it.

So many e-mail newsletters are launched without a clear mission, and without quantitative goals. In my experience, these are less likely to succeed than the ones that are well thought-out from the get-go. Doing it right for the launch will deliver you better results right from the get-go -- and may save you time and money later trying to 'fix' something that's not working.  

If you're celebrating it (and even if you're not), have a great Fourth of July weekend! I'll publish again next month -- as always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome.

                                                    Best,

                                                    
                                                    Jeanne S. Jennings
                                                              Consultant, Marketing and New Product Development
                                                              Publisher, The Jennings Report
                                                              Columnist, ClickZ.com
                                                              mailto:publisher@jenningsreport.com
                                                              Phone: 202-333-3245

Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear what you have to say. Feel free to contact me with any thoughts or feedback about this publisher's note.