Time for a Newsletter Makeover

So… if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of the past 20 years, it’s that running a business on the Internet is a constantly changing entity, and that the Internet always seems to advance at a faster rate than I can keep pace with! (Am I alone here?)

The latest example of this phenomenon is my bi-monthly Newsletter. I’ve been publishing my business newsletter since February of 2006. While I was in the process of building up my mailing list, I hosted and published our newsletter on our website. But as our mailing list grew and became too cumbersome for us to handle on our own, I relocated it, as well as our newsletter archive to a private platform (ymlp.com), in July of 2009, and there it has lived and thrived until long about 2020.

Because it was about then that our Newsletter “opens” started slowly dropping for no apparent reason. By mid-2022, we started getting complaints from our subscribers that they were no longer seeing our Newsletter, even in their Spam Folder. And by the end of 2023, our Newsletter was only reaching about 1/4 of our subscribers. Did I question the good folks at ymlp.com about what was, or was not going on? Sure I did, but the answers I got were, in a word… condescending!

I knew I had to make a BIG change!

But honestly… the thought of doing so, scared me half to death!

The last straw for me, was in mid-February ’24, when the Newsletter announcing the release of our new pattern, the Tandem DayPack, only reached 1/4 of our Newsletter list (of 23,050)! I spent the better part of the next week researching my options and finally decided to give Zoho Campaigns a try, since they were offering a 14-day FREE trial. My thinking was to compare the results of basically the same Newsletter being published on my old platform versus this new one!

And the results were nothing short of astounding!

1st off– The email builder was pretty easy to learn & use, PLUS…the result looked much more polished & professional.

2nd– Both the chat help AND the call-in support was easy-to-reach and get this…. HELPFUL!! (the only way I could reach the folks at my former platform was by email & then there was a wait of 24-48 hours for a reply).
3rd– I was so pleased to get my first email Newsletter finished & ready to send in one day’s time!
4th– Twenty-four hours later my Newsletter was released to all 23,030 of my subscribers. Problem was though, they had to stop the the transmittal twice because there were too many “hard bounced” emails in my mailing lists. They had to remove them ALL first for security reasons!

I guess the big question now… is why my former Newsletter service didn’t rid these hard bounces from my list as they should have? And could this be in large part why my Newsletter performance has been so poor for the last so many months? I may never know these answers, but what I do know is this, because of feedback from many of our subscribers…

• Our new Newsletter format is easier to navigate and more professional looking.
• We had a bigger response from this Newsletter than we’ve had in over a year!
• There is simply no comparison between the new mobile version of our Newsletter and that of the old platform. I’ve had SO many positive remarks about how much more readable and easier it is to navigate in the new format.
• There was an incredible increase in both the number of “opens” and “clicks” for this Newsletter! We haven’t enjoyed this type of response in over 18 months!

So in summary…

We’ll be staying with this new platform. I should’ve made this move a LONG time ago! And thank you SO much to all of you who took the time to let us know your opinion!

And here’s the deal… Maybe you haven’t seen our Newsletter in your Inbox for awhile because it’s been stuck in SPAM. Or maybe you’d like to sign up and give it a look the next time we publish (this week, on Friday March 15th).

It’s really easy to sign up!
Just click HERE