Was hoping to get some feedback on theatre company e-newsletters. In no particular order, the questions are:
- What software do you use to build your e-newsletters?
- How do you manage and develop your email contact database?
- What makes a good e-newsletter?
- How do you send it out (from your own computer, or through a third party distributor)?
- What are some of the other tools you use to make your newsletters?
- How do you measure the success of a newsletter mailout?
- Any other thoughts or tips on how to make a good e-newsletter?
Any feedback or discussion would be most appreciated. Thanks!
Staged and Confused’s newsletter featuring our upcoming production of Judith Thompson’s The Crackwalker can be found here:
http://stagedandconfused.com/email/august/index.html
– We design the newsletter in Adobe Dreamweaver.
– We use a company called MailChimp to manage our database and send mailings
– The big marker for our newsletter is giving recipients access to exclusive content like ticket discounts OR advance notice of things like production announcements, behind the scenes videos, etc. But the main force is to drive traffic to our website, hopefully to generate a ticket purchase but even more as a reminder of who we are and what we’re doing.
I read this newsletter when it came out and it was really great. Break a leg with the production Michael!
Thanks! And I forgot to mention one quick thing: Mail Chimp is great because they have Pay as You go campaigns, and you aren’t locked into a contract. It costs about 3 cents per e-mail, but you’re virtually guaranteed it won’t get lost in spam filters.
That is a great newsletter.
And Dreamweaver? That makes so much sense. So helpful.
I’ve heard MailChimp is good.
Thanks.
How do you guys keep track of your email database? In terms of adding new entries. Deleting “unsubscribes”. Etc.
MailChimp handles your list maintenance as well. They provide you with HTML code to plunk into a sign-up page:
http://stagedandconfused.com/newsletter.html
Then any subscribes or unsubscribes are managed automatically in the admin section of MailChimp. There’s a free sign-up as well if you want to try it out.
Hey Ian,
Apparently we have moved over to Mail Chimp as well. I say apparently since for the first time I am not doing anything except some of the writing. I think that you have received most of the info for managing your email. They also have a handy item whereby you can see how many and who clicked through on your hot links as well as opened up your email. It makes for a great knowledge base for evaluating on the efficacy of your newsletter.
However if you are looking to manage more info like donors/members etc then you have to look at other software.