Hi Angels
It's great that your institute is so active, but that sounds like a lot of information to summarise through a single monthly email newsletter.
These are all good questions to consider and I think the best people to ask are your current email list subscribers. Could you run a short survey through a service like Google Forms or Survey Monkey?
Conventional wisdom has it that with email newsletters consistency is more important than frequency, and that plain is better than highly-designed (though this depends on your sector to some extent).
The current trend in email list communication is to segment your list by interest so that each person only recieves the information which is most relevant to them. Aside from the obvious benefits to your subscribers, this segmentation will increase your open and click through rates, and consequently your deliverability should improve as more emails arrive in the primary inbox of your subscribers.
The way segmentation is normally done with an existing list is:
- survey your list about their interests and how they want to receive information;
- analyse their replies and try to identify 4-6 "buckets" of main interests which cover most of the respondents;
- send an email to the list with self-segment links so each subscriber can click the interest group which appeals to them;
- in future each subscriber then receives an email of curated news relevant only to that interest;
- new subscribers are invited to self-segment in their welcome email.
A useful book explaining this strategy in detail is "Ask" by Ryan Levesque.
To make this work technically you'll need an email list provider which is tag-based (eg Convert Kit) rather than list-based (eg MailChimp).
The way this might look in practice is that each month all the list would receive one email with the features and curated "best of" summary; and the subscribers who had opted-in to one of the interest groups would also receive their specialist email summary. (If your main purpose is to pubicise events, it would even be possible to allow subscribers to click a link to tag themselves so that they are emailed when another similiar event is organised in future - these interest groups can be as finely detailed as you like eg "Quantum physics through the medium of mime" :-) )
If you want to chat about any of this more Angels, just get in touch with me off-list.
All the best
Paul
--
Dr Paul McCrory
learn differently ltd
t 028 9446 3439
e [log in to unmask]
w www.learn-differently.com
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