Login

Hi there friend,

As the year draws to a close, I’m struck by how easy it is to just slip into planning for the next one. Sean, the rest of the AWeber team and I are already deep into 2024 mode ourselves.

But I think it’s just as important to take some time to reflect on the year that just passed so we can actually absorb the lessons we learned before rolling into 2024.

So today, I’m going to share a few of the most helpful lessons I’ve learned from this year of writing this newsletter that I think you could use in your own newsletter.

✅ A newsletter checklist is invaluable

On October 26th, I sent an email about lessons to be learned from MLB team emails. One of those lessons was to make sure your email wasn’t so long it got clipped in Gmail.

Any guess what happened to that newsletter?

Yep, was so long it got clipped in Gmail.

This happened because I didn’t follow the pre-flight checklist for sending the newsletter. If you don’t have a pre-flight checklist, you should. It’ll keep you from making mistakes like these and give you plenty of peace of mind.

Here’s a simple checklist to get you started

☑️ Do all my links actually go where they’re supposed to go (AWeber has built in link checking to warn you if your links are broken)?

☑️ Do all of my images have alt text set for people with visual impairments or images turned off in their email client?

☑️ Will my email be clipped by Gmail because it is too long (send yourself a test in a Gmail inbox to check for yourself)?

☑️ Is my from address a personal domain (using a generic email address like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com is going to cause issues getting your mail into your reader’s inboxes)?

☑️ Does my email look good on phones and other small screens (AWeber lets you preview your email on mobile devices)?

🍎 Teach something that can be easily applied

We’ve sent 50 newsletters so far this year (we must’ve missed one somewhere). Looking back at the feedback and engagement in those emails it appears that our most successful newsletters are the ones where we teach something you can try out for yourself then and there.

Furthermore, teach with examples. For example, the email we sent two weeks ago with tips and examples for improving email readability got more than 6 times the normal amount of responses we usually get. And 98% of the replies were positive.

We heard things like:

• "I will be saving this to refer to later on. Honestly this is the first email I have read from top to bottom in a very long time. I was engaged the entire time."
• "Lots of useful tips and practical applications."
• "Useful and easy to implement."
• “To the point and helpful. Rather than saying do this you showed us with examples.”

📹 Video has its place

Over the summer, I got really curious about the impact of including video versions of the newsletter in each edition. So we ran some experiments and found that, yes, including a video version did increase clicks in the message as well as feedback from readers like:

• "Video is best for the key message and the rest for resources - difficult to catch in a video but sent me back to the email for detail and links."
• "Very informative, much more personal than a print version."
• "Very clear and on point, and I love video content"

But you may have noticed that we don’t include those video versions anymore.

There are two reasons for this:

Diminishing returns: The more we included video versions of the newsletter… the fewer clicks on it we got. I think this probably means that the novelty of it wore off on readers, although it could also just mean I was doing a bad job with the videos!

This does not mean that video doesn’t have a place in newsletters. In fact, I think it says that video has the potential to have a really big impact, when used to highlight important things, and not necessarily in every email.

Engagement ROI: Along with diminishing returns on video clicks, we never saw any sort of sustained increase in engagement with the rest of the links in our email. Including video didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help there either.

What I learned from this is that, if your intent is to drive someone to the video itself, including a video in your email is super smart. But if you’re hoping it’ll increase engagement with the rest of your email, speaking as one newsletter publisher, I didn’t see that.

📈 Consistency pays off

In early fall I wrote a newsletter about how we increased our open rates over the year (update, they've just kept going up since then!).

But I want to let you in on a little secret: Sometimes, especially early on, I didn’t want to write this newsletter.

I’m sure you’ve felt that same feeling. With everything else going on, and when it can sometimes feel like you’re not making progress, it’s all too easy to give up.

But if I can leave you with one piece of advice it’s this, don’t give up.

Find someone to keep you accountable, maybe someone else writing a newsletter of their own, and keep putting out what you have to give into the world.

Consistency is the cheat code.

With all that, I hope you have a fantastic new year. I’m rooting for you in 2024.

What did you think of this email?

❤️❤️❤️ Loved it. Can't wait to get the next one.

💔 I didn't really care for it.

Some of our favorite editions from the past year

Normally we talk about something awesome you can do for your business or newsletter here, but instead I want to share some of our favorite (and best performing) newsletters from 2023:

Get our latest expert advice and helpful tips 

As always, thanks for reading!

- Chris V. and the rest of the AWeber team