July 30, 2024 • 10 mins
In this episode, Camille addresses a common concern from Julie about newsletter engagement. Camille shares practical advice on how to gauge and enhance reader interaction with your newsletters, especially when you're just starting out.
Discover tips on interpreting open and click rates, soliciting feedback from your audience, and leveraging your intuition to craft compelling content. Camille also discusses the importance of perseverance and continuous improvement in your newsletter writing journey.
For those looking to deepen their newsletter skills, Camille introduces her paid newsletter, "Write Better Letters," which includes co-writing sessions and peer feedback opportunities. Tune in for valuable insights and actionable strategies to make your newsletters more engaging and effective.
You might also wish to check out Episode 44: The Creepiness Factor when you Send Email Newsletters.
To leave your own question: https://www.intheclinic.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman.
In this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits for herbalists,
nutritionists, and other practitioners to help people who are working on growing
and expanding their businesses.
So today I have a question from Julie.
Some of you all know that I am in the process of writing a book about how to
(00:22):
use newsletters to build your one-on-one practice.
I've finished a draft of it. It's out for beta readers right now.
So I was really excited to get this newsletter newsletter-oriented question from Julie.
Let me read you a modified version of what Julie sent along.
Julie says, I seem to send out newsletters, but I'm not sure my audience is even reading them.
How do I get more engagement or feedback from my newsletters?
(00:42):
And Julie notes that there is an app, she does have a way to see opens and that sort of thing.
So this is a really common question, especially when folks are just starting out with a newsletter.
I don't know if that's Julie's case or not. I'm not sure how long Julie's been
going with this newsletter.
But in general, especially when you have a small number of readers and you've
only sent out a small number of newsletters.
(01:04):
It's really easy to be like, is this working? Is anybody reading this?
Is it making a difference for anybody? You just don't know.
And it does feel kind of like stepping over a ledge and not being totally sure
what's there to support you.
So I want to say a couple of things about this. First of all,
when you are new to writing a newsletter, even if you are very skilled and practiced
(01:25):
at writing other things, some people are and some people aren't,
you are a beginner in this area.
And what that means is you're going to mess up sometimes. And by mess up,
I mean, sometimes you might send newsletters that are kind of a dud.
You might send newsletters that are too long or too rambly or where you didn't
come across very authentically or whatever.
(01:45):
There may be issues with them. There is absolutely no way to get around that
other than just doing it.
You have to go through it to get to the other side. It's just like walking,
learning how to walk, learning how to ride a bike.
You can't learn to walk perfectly without ever falling down.
Nobody learns how to ride a bike without taking a few tumbles and maybe a lot of tumbles.
(02:06):
That's part of it. And you'll just get more and more smooth and authentic and used to this as you go.
So in the beginning, you just feel really tentative and you're looking around
like, am I doing this right? Is this working?
And sometimes there really isn't a ton of feedback. So what do we do?
How do we have the wherewithal to keep putting one foot in front of the other,
(02:27):
to keep writing, to keep sending to trust in ourselves, in the work that we're doing, and so forth?
Well, there's a couple things to think about. Number one is you do have a little
bit of data from your email service provider.
So no matter what you're using, whether it's MailChimp or ConvertKit or MailerLite
or whatever else it is, they will all do some kind of statistics where they
(02:49):
will give you the open rate and the number of people who clicked and the number
of people who unsubscribed.
Those are all numbers. I've done a whole separate podcast on the creepiness
factor of these analytics from your newsletter service provider.
So I'm not going to go into that here, but I will try to link it in the show
notes. So if you want to listen to that one too, you can.
But what we can tell by globally looking at these numbers is,
(03:12):
oh, okay, are people opening my newsletter letter and clicking it.
If you see both of those things happening, then great, you have at least some
feedback that people are finding something that you've said interesting.
And if they continue opening it, then that's a good sign. They liked what they
saw before, so they want to see what you have this next time.
The open rate, people always want to know what is a specific open rate that would be good to aim for.
(03:36):
And especially in the beginning, when you have a small-ish number of subscribers,
it really, there aren't benchmarks to use.
If you start looking like, oh, industry benchmark is 20% open rate and mine
is 70 or whatever it is, in the beginning, it is just going to be higher.
That is a feature of having a new-ish newsletter that a lot of the first subscribers
(03:56):
are people that you know or you already have a connection with.
And those people do tend to have a higher open rate and click rate.
So we can't put too much stock in it, the absolute numbers, but what we can
see is over time, are your open rates and your click rates, are they staying about the same, right?
If they are going down a little bit because you're getting lots and lots of
(04:16):
new subscribers, great.
But if you have been, you know, 60 or 70% and all of a sudden it's 20 or 10,
then you might be like, hmm, okay, this doesn't seem to be resonating well with people.
Same thing if your unsubscribe rate starts to go up a lot, you can get a feel
that, okay, maybe this isn't resonating with my people.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes people are unsubscribing because
(04:37):
they're not your people.
And great, you don't want those people on your list anyway, because they're
not going to sign up for your services.
And that's cool. They should unsubscribe because they would be better served elsewhere.
However, if you're like, okay, I think it's the people that I want to work with,
and they're unsubscribing, then you have that feedback that something that you're
doing isn't necessarily resonating.
So that's one thing that you can look at.
(04:58):
Another thing that you can look at is just generally speaking,
are you getting any feedback at all from the readers?
So are people replying to your messages?
Are you asking clients when they sign up to work with you or come to a class
or whatever it is, how they heard about this and they're saying,
oh yeah, I saw it in your newsletter.
That is going to give you some feedback that, well, okay, people are,
(05:20):
They're, you know, signing up for things based on my newsletter.
They are remembering what I said in their newsletter. This made a difference for them.
If you're like, oh, I don't know, people aren't really writing back to me,
you can request it, right?
So in some of your newsletters, you can say, hey, I'm thinking about teaching
a class next month, and I'll have two topics in mind.
Would you write back to me by just clicking reply and telling me which one of
(05:45):
these would be most interesting to you?
So that would be an option. Or sometimes, I wouldn't do this frequently,
but every now and then you can say, hey, I'm new to writing this newsletter.
I, you know, I'm just trying to gather some feedback on whether it's resonating
for people, what's been helping them.
If you've read this far and you have been enjoying the newsletter,
(06:07):
would you mind replying and just letting me know that you got here and what's
been serving you so that I can do more of that?
You can make a request like that. Again, I wouldn't do that every newsletter,
but periodically it's okay to just say, hey, I just want to check in and see
what's working and what you'd like to see.
You can absolutely do that. So that would be another other thing.
Two more suggestions for how you can get some feedback about your newsletter.
(06:30):
You can ask a colleague, a mentor, a peer, a friend to read it and give you some feedback.
That person may or may not be a potential client.
So think carefully about how much weight you want to give their opinion.
But you might be able to get some feedback of like, oh, I didn't totally understand
what you were saying, or it felt a little long, or if there's anything else
(06:51):
in it they might be able to say to you, that can be helpful.
And lastly, you can use your own intuition. So think about, do you feel good
about what you've written?
Do you feel like you're putting out something that you're proud of that's designed
to speak to your potential clients and that is serving them,
(07:12):
that you have your potential clients in mind?
The more clear you are about who you're writing to and what their needs,
wants, response interests are, the more confident you can feel about this.
Again, the only way to get better is to just keep practicing.
So remember, in the beginning, you usually don't have a ton of subscribers.
(07:33):
So it's a good time to sort of stumble a little bit. Most of the people there already like you.
You've got a lot of leeway to write things where you're like, I don't know.
But then you do something else. And over time, you will get more and more comfortable
the more newsletters you send out. All right.
The last thing I'll tell you is that when you are new to writing a newsletter
(07:53):
and you want to know, you want some feedback about whether this is working,
I would just tell you to read it over yourself.
So write the newsletter, give yourself a break.
Usually I say probably 24 hours
between writing it and then coming back to review it and scheduling it.
But give yourself some time, come back to it and read through it with fresh
(08:13):
eyes and ask yourself, is everything in this newsletter designed to serve my potential client?
So don't worry about your mom or your friends or anybody who's on your newsletter
that isn't a potential client.
But if somebody is a potential client and they were reading this,
would I feel like, oh, good, this is something that they would.
(08:35):
They appreciate getting, whether it's a useful piece of information or it puts
a smile on their face, a word of encouragement, something that helps them,
anything like that, where you're like, okay, yeah, this is something they would like to get.
You can also do a final scan of, is everything here necessary?
Do they need all this information right now? Or are there ways I can simplify
this and really just give them a condensed piece of writing that does one thing
(09:01):
really well, which is, again,
whatever your intention is to share information or motivate or inspire,
encourage, whatever it is. All right.
So if you do that, and you're like, yes, the right person reading this will
appreciate this message, their day will be a little bit better because they
got this, then you go ahead and send it out and just keep sending.
(09:23):
Okay. I hope that that makes sense. I did want to mention that I have a separate newsletter,
it's called right now it's called write better letters and in
that newsletter it's a paid newsletter but we
do once a month we do co-writing newsletter sessions
where we spend an hour writing newsletters and then half an hour
at the end doing peer feedback so if anybody would like to carve out some purposeful
(09:46):
time to write a newsletter and get a little bit of feedback from other newsletter
writers you can sign up for that i'll put the link in the show notes as well
julie i I hope that's helpful. And I hope it's been helpful for some other people as well.
If you have a question that you would like for me to answer in the podcast,
you can go to in the clinic.com.
There's a little pink salmon colored button over on the right side of the page,
(10:10):
depending on what device you're on that just says submit a question.
And you can leave up to a two minute voicemail for me.
And I would love to hear your question and answer it on a podcast episode really
soon. All right. Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you soon and send me your questions if you have them.
Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman.
In this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits for herbalists,
nutritionists, and other practitioners to help people who are working on growing
and expanding their businesses.
So today I have a question from Julie.
Some of you all know that I am in the process of writing a book about how to
(00:22):
use newsletters to build your one-on-one practice.
I've finished a draft of it. It's out for beta readers right now.
So I was really excited to get this newsletter newsletter-oriented question from Julie.
Let me read you a modified version of what Julie sent along.
Julie says, I seem to send out newsletters, but I'm not sure my audience is even reading them.
How do I get more engagement or feedback from my newsletters?
(00:42):
And Julie notes that there is an app, she does have a way to see opens and that sort of thing.
So this is a really common question, especially when folks are just starting out with a newsletter.
I don't know if that's Julie's case or not. I'm not sure how long Julie's been
going with this newsletter.
But in general, especially when you have a small number of readers and you've
only sent out a small number of newsletters.
(01:04):
It's really easy to be like, is this working? Is anybody reading this?
Is it making a difference for anybody? You just don't know.
And it does feel kind of like stepping over a ledge and not being totally sure
what's there to support you.
So I want to say a couple of things about this. First of all,
when you are new to writing a newsletter, even if you are very skilled and practiced
(01:25):
at writing other things, some people are and some people aren't,
you are a beginner in this area.
And what that means is you're going to mess up sometimes. And by mess up,
I mean, sometimes you might send newsletters that are kind of a dud.
You might send newsletters that are too long or too rambly or where you didn't
come across very authentically or whatever.
(01:45):
There may be issues with them. There is absolutely no way to get around that
other than just doing it.
You have to go through it to get to the other side. It's just like walking,
learning how to walk, learning how to ride a bike.
You can't learn to walk perfectly without ever falling down.
Nobody learns how to ride a bike without taking a few tumbles and maybe a lot of tumbles.
(02:06):
That's part of it. And you'll just get more and more smooth and authentic and used to this as you go.
So in the beginning, you just feel really tentative and you're looking around
like, am I doing this right? Is this working?
And sometimes there really isn't a ton of feedback. So what do we do?
How do we have the wherewithal to keep putting one foot in front of the other,
(02:27):
to keep writing, to keep sending to trust in ourselves, in the work that we're doing, and so forth?
Well, there's a couple things to think about. Number one is you do have a little
bit of data from your email service provider.
So no matter what you're using, whether it's MailChimp or ConvertKit or MailerLite
or whatever else it is, they will all do some kind of statistics where they
(02:49):
will give you the open rate and the number of people who clicked and the number
of people who unsubscribed.
Those are all numbers. I've done a whole separate podcast on the creepiness
factor of these analytics from your newsletter service provider.
So I'm not going to go into that here, but I will try to link it in the show
notes. So if you want to listen to that one too, you can.
But what we can tell by globally looking at these numbers is,
(03:12):
oh, okay, are people opening my newsletter letter and clicking it.
If you see both of those things happening, then great, you have at least some
feedback that people are finding something that you've said interesting.
And if they continue opening it, then that's a good sign. They liked what they
saw before, so they want to see what you have this next time.
The open rate, people always want to know what is a specific open rate that would be good to aim for.
(03:36):
And especially in the beginning, when you have a small-ish number of subscribers,
it really, there aren't benchmarks to use.
If you start looking like, oh, industry benchmark is 20% open rate and mine
is 70 or whatever it is, in the beginning, it is just going to be higher.
That is a feature of having a new-ish newsletter that a lot of the first subscribers
(03:56):
are people that you know or you already have a connection with.
And those people do tend to have a higher open rate and click rate.
So we can't put too much stock in it, the absolute numbers, but what we can
see is over time, are your open rates and your click rates, are they staying about the same, right?
If they are going down a little bit because you're getting lots and lots of
(04:16):
new subscribers, great.
But if you have been, you know, 60 or 70% and all of a sudden it's 20 or 10,
then you might be like, hmm, okay, this doesn't seem to be resonating well with people.
Same thing if your unsubscribe rate starts to go up a lot, you can get a feel
that, okay, maybe this isn't resonating with my people.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes people are unsubscribing because
(04:37):
they're not your people.
And great, you don't want those people on your list anyway, because they're
not going to sign up for your services.
And that's cool. They should unsubscribe because they would be better served elsewhere.
However, if you're like, okay, I think it's the people that I want to work with,
and they're unsubscribing, then you have that feedback that something that you're
doing isn't necessarily resonating.
So that's one thing that you can look at.
(04:58):
Another thing that you can look at is just generally speaking,
are you getting any feedback at all from the readers?
So are people replying to your messages?
Are you asking clients when they sign up to work with you or come to a class
or whatever it is, how they heard about this and they're saying,
oh yeah, I saw it in your newsletter.
That is going to give you some feedback that, well, okay, people are,
(05:20):
They're, you know, signing up for things based on my newsletter.
They are remembering what I said in their newsletter. This made a difference for them.
If you're like, oh, I don't know, people aren't really writing back to me,
you can request it, right?
So in some of your newsletters, you can say, hey, I'm thinking about teaching
a class next month, and I'll have two topics in mind.
Would you write back to me by just clicking reply and telling me which one of
(05:45):
these would be most interesting to you?
So that would be an option. Or sometimes, I wouldn't do this frequently,
but every now and then you can say, hey, I'm new to writing this newsletter.
I, you know, I'm just trying to gather some feedback on whether it's resonating
for people, what's been helping them.
If you've read this far and you have been enjoying the newsletter,
(06:07):
would you mind replying and just letting me know that you got here and what's
been serving you so that I can do more of that?
You can make a request like that. Again, I wouldn't do that every newsletter,
but periodically it's okay to just say, hey, I just want to check in and see
what's working and what you'd like to see.
You can absolutely do that. So that would be another other thing.
Two more suggestions for how you can get some feedback about your newsletter.
(06:30):
You can ask a colleague, a mentor, a peer, a friend to read it and give you some feedback.
That person may or may not be a potential client.
So think carefully about how much weight you want to give their opinion.
But you might be able to get some feedback of like, oh, I didn't totally understand
what you were saying, or it felt a little long, or if there's anything else
(06:51):
in it they might be able to say to you, that can be helpful.
And lastly, you can use your own intuition. So think about, do you feel good
about what you've written?
Do you feel like you're putting out something that you're proud of that's designed
to speak to your potential clients and that is serving them,
(07:12):
that you have your potential clients in mind?
The more clear you are about who you're writing to and what their needs,
wants, response interests are, the more confident you can feel about this.
Again, the only way to get better is to just keep practicing.
So remember, in the beginning, you usually don't have a ton of subscribers.
(07:33):
So it's a good time to sort of stumble a little bit. Most of the people there already like you.
You've got a lot of leeway to write things where you're like, I don't know.
But then you do something else. And over time, you will get more and more comfortable
the more newsletters you send out. All right.
The last thing I'll tell you is that when you are new to writing a newsletter
(07:53):
and you want to know, you want some feedback about whether this is working,
I would just tell you to read it over yourself.
So write the newsletter, give yourself a break.
Usually I say probably 24 hours
between writing it and then coming back to review it and scheduling it.
But give yourself some time, come back to it and read through it with fresh
(08:13):
eyes and ask yourself, is everything in this newsletter designed to serve my potential client?
So don't worry about your mom or your friends or anybody who's on your newsletter
that isn't a potential client.
But if somebody is a potential client and they were reading this,
would I feel like, oh, good, this is something that they would.
(08:35):
They appreciate getting, whether it's a useful piece of information or it puts
a smile on their face, a word of encouragement, something that helps them,
anything like that, where you're like, okay, yeah, this is something they would like to get.
You can also do a final scan of, is everything here necessary?
Do they need all this information right now? Or are there ways I can simplify
this and really just give them a condensed piece of writing that does one thing
(09:01):
really well, which is, again,
whatever your intention is to share information or motivate or inspire,
encourage, whatever it is. All right.
So if you do that, and you're like, yes, the right person reading this will
appreciate this message, their day will be a little bit better because they
got this, then you go ahead and send it out and just keep sending.
(09:23):
Okay. I hope that that makes sense. I did want to mention that I have a separate newsletter,
it's called right now it's called write better letters and in
that newsletter it's a paid newsletter but we
do once a month we do co-writing newsletter sessions
where we spend an hour writing newsletters and then half an hour
at the end doing peer feedback so if anybody would like to carve out some purposeful
(09:46):
time to write a newsletter and get a little bit of feedback from other newsletter
writers you can sign up for that i'll put the link in the show notes as well
julie i I hope that's helpful. And I hope it's been helpful for some other people as well.
If you have a question that you would like for me to answer in the podcast,
you can go to in the clinic.com.
There's a little pink salmon colored button over on the right side of the page,
(10:10):
depending on what device you're on that just says submit a question.
And you can leave up to a two minute voicemail for me.
And I would love to hear your question and answer it on a podcast episode really
soon. All right. Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you soon and send me your questions if you have them.
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