Our Adventures in Story: The Making of a Newsletter

Last month, we launched Adventures in Story, Signal Hill's first electronic newsletter. It's been a long time coming (the shoemaker's kids always go barefoot, right?) but we're very excited about this new tool that we'll be using to stay connected and share all sorts of useful information.

Today I'm pulling back the curtain to show you how we created this newsletter. Here are a few tips we learned along the way:

Trim the Fat
Before you get started, think about 3 or 4 segments that you would like to repeat in your newsletter each month and keep your content limited to these features. This is not the place to list volumes upon volumes of information, because you ultimately run the risk of overwhelming your reader. When thinking about content ideas, try to answer the question, "What would bring the most value to our audience?"

Save Time
The Email Stat Center will tell us that the average click-through rate is 5.9%. When it comes down to it, your audience's attention span is very limited. So we thought, why not try to deliver as many self-contained, quick "takeaways" as possible? Instead of linking to a recent blog post, write a short summary or better yet- boil it down to bullet points! This is what we've done with the section of our newsletter "provisions."

Preserve Your Brand
Your newsletter should be treated as a dissemination of your organization's brand. At first, we spent a lot of time brainstorming creative names for our newsletter and its components. And then it hit us. This is not the place to derive from our brand. This should be a continuation of our website and our style and our language. It has to be "us." Once that light bulb went off, "Adventures in Story" was a natural fit and easy theme for us to explore in newsletter format.

Repurpose Content
If you're going to write something especially for your newsletter, make sure you get as much mileage out of it as possible. Post it on your blog, Facebook and Twitter to start. This also gives you the chance to promote your newsletter through various different online outlets.

Make it Mobile
More and more people are viewing email content through mobile devices. This means that your layout must be mobile-friendly and it should also be sharable through online portals like email and social media. If you are including a call-to-action in your newsletter, make sure it's visible and clickable in your mobile version.

Be Compatible (With special technical insight thanks to our designer Kevin Kennedy!)
Standalone email clients can be quite powerful at rendering HTML, whereas Webmail clients can be restrictive in what they allow. Don't be afraid to include background images, but make sure to specify background colors, because that may be all some viewers get.

You can use some techniques that only modern browsers would see, but also stick to some very basic HTML to ensure that it renders on less capable clients. Many e-mail platforms now offer a "web view" of e-newsletters, so some may skip their mail client entirely and use their browser to experience your content. Be ready for the best, but prepared for the worst.

What are some helpful tips you would like to add to the list?

Visit our website to sign up for Adventures in Story!