Aim to impress and engage your email newsletter subscribers every time you arrive in their inbox

Your email newsletter is likely only one of a dozen email newsletters your readers get every day. That’s why first impressions count every time you send an email newsletter.

Most importantly, the first items your reader will notice are:

The from line: Who is this email from?
The subject line: What is the content of this email about?
The preview pane: Does the newsletter represent exactly what you’ve described above?

Here are three checklists for these three most important “first impression” features of your email newsletter.

From Line:

• The email newsletter from line clearly identifies the sender.
• The email newsletter from line is instantly recognizable to subscribers.
• The email newsletter contains both a display and an actual from address.
• The email newsletter from addresses are consistent from send to send.

Subject Line:

• The email newsletter subject line is engaging and benefit-oriented.
• The email newsletter subject line features something unique in the current issue.
• The email newsletter subject line places the most important information first, so that it’s not missed by readers
• The email newsletter subject line doesn’t sound “spammy.”

Preview Pane:

• The email newsletter preview pane includes a recognizable logo (or in the case of a text newsletter, a brand or company name) in a prominent position.
• The email newsletter preview pane includes a strong, benefit-oriented headline or title to help pull readers in.
• The email newsletter preview pane includes a link to view the email online.
• The email newsletter preview pane would engage the reader and pull them in even if the images were blocked.

Does your email newsletter follow all of the above rules?

If you’re a product-driven online publisher, you know there are numerous strategies for making money with email. The fun (and higher profits) comes with testing, tweaking and fine-tuning.

You can test the email sponsorship model versus the pay-per-click advertising model. Which is more profitable?

You can carry multiple advertisers who pay different amounts based on the position of their ads. Which produces more revenue per thousand subscribers?

Or you can test basic template design. Where should the featured product be introduced? Does an in-line text ad beat a banner ad? Or does a product review generate greater response?

Should you link into the sales letter landing page, or straight into the data collection page? Should you offer the reader an opportunity to “Read more” or “Buy now”?

Any experienced direct marketer, working with an online newsletter editor, can think of 10 variations of the email newsletter template to test. And because we’re all so new at this, typically five or seven out of 10 changes will produce an improvement!

The key to incremental improvement is having a formal test plan and using the right tools to track and measure your results.

We recently re-recorded the Mequoda Pro Online Training Program entitled, “Email Newsletter Marketing — Testing to Maximize Email Revenue and Profit.”

This Mequoda Pro Online Seminar along with our Mequoda Email Performance Report, Email Circulation Calculator, and Email Lifetime Calculator are four of the many benefits of Mequoda Pro membership.

For one all-inclusive price, you can get instant-access to our Email Newsletter Marketing online training program, the Mequoda Email Performance Report, Email Circulation Calculator, Email Lifetime Calculator, ten more business-building sessions, and an ever-growing collection of reports and spreadsheet tools you can use to manage your own business.

Join Mequoda Pro today!

Take the Mequoda Reader Survey and let us know what topics interest you most

As a research company, we’re constantly looking to not only find the latest best practices in our industry, but we’re also always listening and soliciting feedback for hot topics and relevant case studies.

That’s why today we have a “reader survey” that asks what topics YOU are most interested in learning about. Is it social media? Membership websites? Email marketing? Something else?

Let us know! It will only take you a couple minutes and you’ll have our eternal gratitude.

Take the Mequoda Reader Survey.

Conducting user surveys is one of the best ways to got an overall consensus on what your audience is thinking about. Different types of surveys that might be relevant to your own business might be:

• New product surveys - What topics should we create a book about?
• New media surveys - Is our audience interested in video?
• Membership pricing - How much would our audience be willing to pay?

In our case, we’re very interested in what you have to say about the following topics so that we can cater our upcoming Mequoda Summit to your interests. It’s not only invaluable to our agenda, but it also helps shape the topics we write about on the Mequoda Daily as well.

When reaching out to your audience, we recommend gathering information from as many sources as possible:

• Your email list
• Your daily blog readers
• Your Twitter followers
• Your LinkedIn network

Be especially careful not to make your reach too broad though, as there’s a difference in getting tons of feedback, and tons of targeted feedback.

So, do us a huge favor so that we might serve you the type of content that you would like to be served, and take our Mequoda Reader Survey.

All our Google Adsense tips, packaged in a new FREE white paper: Web Advertising Tips for Google Adsense

We put together a nice little 14 page white paper today that includes a bunch of Google Adsense articles, tips and best practices from the Mequoda Daily blog.

Here are a few bits of repurposed content from the white paper Web Advertising Tips for Google Adsense that we packaged together for you so that you can download it to your computer or print it out to keep at your desk.

Is Google AdSense right for you?

Size, in terms of traffic or the number of site pages, doesn’t really matter as to whether a publisher can, or should, become a Google AdSense partner. Quality content is the defining feature. In fact, the program is a great opportunity for publishers with quality content, but limited or light traffic and/or few site pages. In this tip we give you a brief overview of the Google Adsense program and how it’s useful for publishers.

How to Get Banned by Google AdSense

If you are a publisher using Google AdSense, you may or may not know how easy it is to tick off the Google Gods. We’d all like to think we’re honest business people, and we’d never click on our own ads, but you might be unaware of some of the lesser known rules laid out by Google. In this tip we showed you the best ways to get your Google AdSense account suspended.

Google AdSense Design Tips

According to Google, certain locations on your website tend to be more successful than others. In this tip we went over the different “heat maps” that Google uses to show Adsense publishers where the best ad-slots are on any given page.

With these tips (and a bit more), we put together a new white paper called Web Advertising Tips for Google Adsense. Download it today, it’s free!

Have you ever wondered why some publications — both print and online — enjoy a wealth of advertising support, while others — perhaps yours — barely show a respectable profit?

Maximizing revenues with Internet ad sales doesn’t happen by chance. And it’s not solely the result of great ad sales reps, although well educated ad sales professionals are indispensable.

As our publishing colleague Diane Schwartz of minonline.com says, “From how to structure your sales staff, to how to price your integrated programs, Internet ad sales is a challenge faced by the whole publishing team: marketing, PR, advertising, sales, editorial.”

“Sure, the salesperson needs to close the deal, but others on your team need to create the opportunity, whether it’s outstanding editorial content or a well-navigated site design.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Driving online revenue with optimized ad sales is a deliberate process that requires configuring your infrastructure, content, marketing, research and sales.

A couple months ago, we held one of our best-received webinars called Internet Advertising Basics with Dan Ambrose. Dan has made a career of unraveling and demystifying the complexities of publication ad sales.

He worked on the founding of iVillage.com, About.com, MediaBistro.com, and Beliefnet.com and has consulted with Primedia Magazines, Smithsonian, Children’s Television Workshop, and many others.

We’ve conjured up several tips from this webinar (which was also a session at the Mequoda Summit in April) to share with you.

Dan’s suggestions on how increase ad impressions with email newsletters:

1. Content in the email newsletter can be set up as “teaser” copy and drive traffic back to the website. This is usually accomplished with a hyper-linked headline and incomplete teaser copy.

2. Make email newsletters part of your advertising package. Launch email newsletters that advertisers will support. Ambrose recommends focusing on your strongest advertising categories first.

Dan’s suggestions for several sponsorship opportunities you can offer your advertisers:

• Channel sponsorship
• Branded tools by the advertisers who “sponsor” them
• White papers for lead generation
• Webinars

Dan’s three steps for selling online advertising to print clients:

First, offer them a package. They are already buying ads in your print product, so the next logical step is to offer them ad space on your website for an increased rate as a “print + online package”. This shouldn’t be a hard sell, so long as you follow the next two steps.

Second, let them be more active. Advertisers get bored with “text links” and “banner ads” very quickly, so come up with new ways for them to increase leads by letting them become more active in your marketing. Let them sponsor contests, interview them for your subscription products, so on and so forth.

Third, offer them a sponsorship opportunity. If you’re looking to really build out your website, offer them the chance to sponsor sections of your website. Sites like RCRWireless.com let advertisers sponsor whole topics, while others like AutoTrader.com let them sponsor online tools. Still, some, like Computerworld.com offer their advertisers “Zones” where they can give away a free report in exchange for email leads that go directly to the advertiser.

Want to learn more from this 90-minute Internet advertising seminar for publishers?

We have two options for you.

You can get this seminar delivered to you on CD-ROM, complete with video presentation, slides in PDF format, and Dan’s two worksheets:

• Advertiser Schedule Flowchart – An easily customized Internet Advertising Sales Proposal Sheet and Hybrid Media Flowchart.
• Content Traffic Revenue Factors – A worksheet that will show you the cumulative effect of improving 5 factors by only 10% each that increases revenue opportunity by 89%.

Or, you can register for Mequoda Pro today—for the same price—and start watching the seminar and downloading the worksheets this afternoon.

In addition to the Internet Advertising Basics online seminar, with Mequoda Pro you’ll also receive TEN BONUS 30-60 minute business-building sessions for publishers, editors and online marketers.

Register for Mequoda Pro now and start watching Internet Advertising Basics instantly!

Taking a web advertising lesson from Dan Ambrose on “rabbit ear” ads, and how they’re sold and distributed on NYTimes.com

We recently got a question from one of our Mequoda Summit attendees, referencing Dan Ambrose’s Internet Advertising Basics session.

“At the summit, I got all enthused about “rabbit ear ads” (I think that’s what they’re called—the ads on either side at the top), but they seem to have disappeared from the New York Times, etc. Now, all the rage seems to be the rich media banners. Any thoughts on this?”

Here was Ambrose’s answer:

First, these are really two separate issues… the placement and size of the ad units, and the creative content of the units.

The “ears” that NYTimes.com offers on its home page only run when they are sold… so some days or for some page-views they may not be there.  They are today – for me.

As you can see Continental Air is in the ears today.  If they bought a million impressions today and the site was delivering 2 million, they might only appear in 1 of every 2 pages served.

Also it could be that the ads are geo-targeted.

However, rich media is an opportunity of interest to many advertisers.

You can (technically) put rich media into any shape ad unit.  The unit simply represents the space within which the rich media resides…or grows out of in a ‘mouse-over-expandable.’

The NYTimes may not allow distracting animations, or videos or expandables in the ears due to respect for their readers…but technically they could.”

When our attendee went back to NYTimes.com, he noticed that the ads were back.

Says Ambrose, “for most ad-units, the unsold spot is filled with a house ad or network delivered remnant filler.  In the case of the ears they appear only when sold.”

What about you, do you have any questions about selling or developing ad units?

We’ve just uploaded the recent Internet Advertising Basics webinar (and previous Summit session) we held with Dan Ambrose to Mequoda Pro today. When you become a member of Mequoda Pro, you can watch this online seminar and ten more on-demand at your convenience.

You’ll have access to our Q&A forums to ask questions like this that will be answered by us in under 72 hours.

So go ahead, join Mequoda Pro and lay your questions on us!