Measuring Your Newsletter’s Success
- Dec 5, 2016
- 2 min read
Okay, so you just spent hours, days or maybe even weeks slaving away on a newsletter for an organization you are involved in. But even though you have completed the task of creating your article, your work is still not done. A newsletter is not truly successful unless it relays the necessary information to an audience in a way that can be easily understood, so use these four methods of evaluating your newsletter to measure your success.
Content Analysis
Find a previously-written newsletter that accurately represents a majority of your work, and break it down into sections. Make sure you highlight each main subject to allow an accurate representation of the topics you regularly cover. Then, you can look at the analysis and see how much time, space and energy you devote to any given subject, and ultimately decide upon what is important, and not-so-important, to keep including in the future.
2. Reader Interest Surveys
One of the easiest ways to find out if your readers are enjoying your newsletter’s content is to ASK THEM! Send a short survey out to your core group of readers once a year, and use their satisfaction ratings to help plan the content of your future publications.
3. Article Recall
This method is especially helpful because it identifies what the “insiders”, the employees of the publication, are actually reading. You can perform this by getting a small yet diverse group of employees together and interviewing them about what they actually remember from several issues of the newsletter. Results from this will show what is truly memorable from each newsletter, and what needs more help to get noticed.
4. Focus Groups
During this method, employees from several different departments of the organization sit down and brainstorm. They can talk about anything from what they liked or didn’t like in a newsletter, to what they would like to change about the brainstorming or production processes in order to make the organization more efficient. It can be easy for employee to get stuck in a rut and lose creativity, so this is particularly good for ensuring employees stay creative and newsletters stay interesting and informative.
Feedback is important for any publication, both from the audience and from those who work on the composition of the newsletter. And with these four methods, a little extra effort can result in much higher satisfaction with the organization-- both inside and out.
Comments