By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

E-mail newsletters seem to be the comeback kid of the digital publishing world with major players like the New York Times, Quartz, and even TheSkimm turning to newsletters to drive revenue now that the social media bubble has (largely) burst.

While e-mail newsletters can be built to accomplish many different goals, and therefore rely on many different metrics to determine their success or failure, an editorial newsletter’s success is hinged on its open rate. Editorial newsletters aren’t trying to convince their audience to click-through to a story, they’re usually standalone pieces with the goal of driving loyalty and selling sponsorships or digital subscriptions. This makes a high open rate critical to their success.

Use the tips and tricks below to achieve and maintain a high e-mail newsletter open rate.

1. Make it personal – Ditch the “donotreply@yourdomainhere.com.” Editorial newsletters should be sent using the author’s e-mail address. This personal touch will lead to better open rates because users form a relationship with the sender, opening the e-mail because they recognize the address.


2. Maintain a regular publishing schedule – Send your editorial newsletter at the same time every day or at the same time of day on a specific day of the week. You want your readers to get into the habit of reading your editorial content, creating a ritual around it. A schedule is habit-forming.


3. Offer up your own original editorial content – Design your newsletter to be read right in the inbox with engaging original content. Don’t distract your readers with a lot of outbound links to various websites. Keep the newsletter format easy to read with headlines, line breaks, and links only to supplement and support the newsletter’s content. Readers should feel like they’ve been sufficiently informed by reading just the e-mailed newsletter.


4. Regularly clean up your e-mail contact lists – It’s important that your newsletter hones in and focuses on the right audience. Remove newsletter recipients who never open or read the newsletter you’re sending. You don’t want to become an inbox nuisance to those who clearly aren’t interested in what your editorials are covering. Instead, focus on cultivating communities of interested readers with your editorial newsletters.

Newsletters start with a small audience and grow organically through forwarding. Are you using newsletters at your publication to drive revenue and growth?