Three tips for how often to publish your newsletter

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Newsletters are a great way to connect with your clients, prospects, and referral sources. But you may lose–or even alienate–readers if you communicate too often. If you don’t contact them often enough, they may not think of you at the right time.

In this blog post, I’m sharing my top three tips to help you decide how often to publish your newsletter.

1. Consider what your readers want 

How often do your readers want to hear from you? Poll them informally when you meet with them. If they’re frequent web surfers, you could conduct an online poll.

Weekly is too frequent, in my opinion, unless your audience is signing up for short market commentary or financial planning tips.
Monthly is the sweet spot for many newsletters. Especially if you’re targeting prospective clients and referral sources, it’s a gentle reminder of your existence. But it’s not so frequent that it’s obnoxious.
Quarterly works well for many financial advisors. Your newsletter can complement quarterly account statements or market commentary.

2. Don’t over-commit.

Come up with a publishing schedule you can stick to because there’s no sense in making promises you can’t keep. Your readers will begin to count on you if you communicate regularly. If you can’t stock to your commitment to publish, clients and prospects may wonder how committed you are to other aspects of your business.  

3. Offer choices.

If your company is robust enough to offer multiple publications at different intervals, let your readers choose how often they’ll hear from you. For example,  one advisor offered the option of receiving emails “for each new post, daily, weekly, or monthly. You can even choose to receive an e-mail for each new post AND weekly in order to ensure you don’t miss out on anything.” The advisor’s default was to send a weekly newsletter.

 

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

My broken link to "Should you drop subscribers who don’t open your newsletter?"

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Dear newsletter readers,


Here’s the link that wasn’t working in my August newsletter:
      “Should you drop subscribers who don’t open your newsletter?“


I apologize for inconveniencing you. Thank you for bearing with me.

 

Poll: What newsletter strategies work best for investment and wealth managers?

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Newsletters are an important part of marketing for many investment and wealth management firms.

You’ve got lots of options. 

  • Print newsletter vs. e-newsletter
  • Quarterly, monthly or weekly frequency
  • Market commentary and/or other topics
  • Articles that you write yourself vs. articles written by a writer whom you hire, so they reflect your firm’s views vs. articles that are mass-produced by a firm that sells the same content to others

I’d like to learn your opinion on what works best. Please answer the poll in the right-hand column of this blog. 

Also, feel free to leave a comment below.

FINRA’s limits on registered rep use of ghostwriters

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Registered representatives, if you distribute an article with your name, FINRA wants you to contribute most of the content.

That seems to be the minimum requirement, according to comments I’ve received from other financial marketing writers in LinkedIn’s Financial Writing/Marketing Communications Group. Your compliance department may have stricter requirements, so check before you publish.

“Misleading Communications About Expertise,” a FINRA regulatory noticed dated May 2008, appears to lay out the rules. It says, “Registered representatives may not suggest (or encourage others to suggest) that they authored investment-related books, articles or similar publications if they did not write them. Such a publication created by a third-party vendor must disclose that it was prepared either by the third party or for the representative’s use.”

However, what does it mean to write an article?

It appears that ghostwriters can be involved if they aren’t providing the information for the article. In other words, if the rep provides the article’s substance–either through an outline or an interview conducted by the ghostwriter–and if the rep oversees revisions to the article, then it’s okay. At least that’s what I took away from the comments of writers who interact more closely than me with compliance experts.

Again, be sure to check with your firm’s compliance department before you publish.

If you’ve had experience with this topic, I welcome your comments.

Should you drop subscribers who don’t open your e-newsletter?

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If you’re like most e-newsletter senders, you track the statistics on how many subscribers open each issue. Personally, I check them multiple times because I get a rush out of every click on my monthly Investment Writing Update. But there are people who never seem to read my newsletter.  

This made me ask, should you drop people whose names don’t appear on your open list?  

I’ve been mulling this over for awhile. After all, you’ll get charged more each time your readership rises above a certain level by firms such as Constant Contact that provide a way to manage your email lists and format your newsletters. 

I finally decided that I should not drop the non-openers. Not if they are good potential source of business or referrals. Open statistics aren’t all that matter because
1. Newsletter open statistics aren’t 100% accurate.
2. You may benefit from people who don’t open your newsletter, but will think of you when they finally need you, your product, or your services. 

Inaccurate statistics
 “Your open rate could be higher than what is reported,” said Constant Contact, the newsletter service that I use.

There are all sorts of technical reasons why open rates may be under-reported. To my non-technical mind, the reasons boil down to your audience’s choice of email reader and email reader settings–things over which you have no control. “Open rates are becoming less accurate with many people reading email from hand held devices and disabling image downloading, said the Email Marketing Metrics Report (June 2009). The move to hand held devices has accelerated dramatically since that report was published.

I know one e-newsletter writer who deleted all of the subscribers who hadn’t opened at least one recent issue. She got many complaints from readers who were inaccurately categorized as non-openers. Plus, she lost subscribers like me who enjoyed the newsletter, but only read it occasionally.

You may benefit from non-readers
 “I never read your newsletter,” said a colleague. She’s just too busy and my content doesn’t isn’t relevant enough to her narrow circumstances. On the other hand, she said, “I see your name every month in my email, so I’m reminded of you.” This jolt has contributed to her giving me dozens of useful contacts over the years.

It can be useful to gently remind your prospective clients and referral sources of your existence.

Sometimes “they would prefer to ignore your messages until they are ready to buy,” according to Dela Quist, as quoted in “Just Wait For Me” in MarketingProfs’ Get to the Point: Email Marketing  newsletter. This has happened to me. I got a very warm introduction–and a great client–from someone who had ignored me for months.

My conclusion? If individuals have voluntarily signed up for your e-newsletter, there’s no harm in keeping them on your list. Indeed, one of those subscribers could become your next client. 

July 29, 2009 update: Thanks to Morningstar’s Mike Barad for reminding me that Outlook’s preview pane can produce false “open” statistics. You may mistakenly think that an Outlook user opened your email. However, it’s hard to know if this overreporting outweighs the underreporting. Perhaps you just shouldn’t rely too much on open statistics.

Image courtesy of hywards at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.