174. Baking it Down - Know Newsletters

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📧 Know Newsletters - What to send to who and how often.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 174 - Know Newsletters, we talk everything you need to know about newsletters. These powerhouses in digital marketing are some of the most untouched real estate in the cottage world - and why? We're not sure - but if you capitalize on it now, you'll be cookin' (baking?) with fire come the busy season.

Jumping straight into it - in the Onesday Wednesday newsletter, I included the 90-day line chart of our weekly newsletter (this is a Sendgrid report). It's sent on Wednesdays, and you can see I missed a Wednesday a few months ago (the dead zone where there's no peak) and again last week (fam stuff).

The big takeaway in this chart isn't the number of people receiving our emails. It's the consistency at which the newsletters are sent, how many emails reach an inbox (deliverability), how many get opened (open rate), and what gets clicked on (click-through rate).
So let's break down the making of solid bones for a newsletter. Before we jump into the content, we gotta actually have a list. So let's start there and build.

📨 1. Creating an Email List

You've got to generate a list. Review the CAN-SPAM laws, but my take - you can email people who have purchased cookies from you in the past as long as you follow all the other rules. Ideally, your list is compromised of opt-in emails (people who intentionally signed up for your list). Newsletter senders often include free landing pages and sign-up forms to grow your list as well. Giveaways are a great incentive for quick sign-ups.

📨 2. Selecting a Sender.

You won't want to use your personal email to send out newsletters (CAN-SPAM laws require an unsubscribe button and an address), so selecting a newsletter sender is integral to a healthy newsletter campaign. Big names in the biz are Mailchimp, Flodesk, Square, Sendgrid, Constant Contact - there's about a million to choose from so find one that fits your needs, your budget, and your workflow.
📨 3. Preview Content

When you go to write your email - the preview content (the "from," the subject line, the preview text) will help you get that ever-coveted opened email. In the preview content, I like to attract attention with the subject line then draw them in with the supporting preview text. Imagine my Halloween email's subject line reading: "👻 I've Got Something SCARY To Tell You" and the preview line is "🎃The 10 closest pumpkin patches to Fairfax". Preview text isn't available in all inboxes, but always think about drawing folks to the "email open." That subject line is a lot more eye-catching than "September Offerings."

📨 4. Body-yody-yody-yody

The body of your newsletter - the meat and potatoes - is the content your readers are clicking to read. Corrie came up with a cute poem to guide you, "something for me, something for you, but no more than two." Basically - keep it short, sweet, and skim-able. Header tags, bolded fonts, and bulleted lists are your buddies here. Pictures are worth the thousand words you don't have to type out. An example of the "something for me, something for you" is a list of local cideries in your area + your back-to-school offerings. Another example is your January "Build a Snowman" cookie class + a list of local sledding hills the kids love. You get the point. Don't jam-pack a newsletter with a million different offerings, 4 CTAs (call-to-actions), and a billion photos - you're making that poor newsletter do too many things and thus it does nothing really. FOCUS on one initiative per email.

We cover more tips in this week's podcast like templates, how nested header tags work, an ideal schedule for someone getting