Tag: newsletter

What is a newsletter?

A newsletter may refer to several different platforms: an email newsletter, a print (or digital) newsletter, or a newsletter subscription website.

An email newsletter is a daily and often weekly email sent to a list of email subscribers with links to your editorial content. A promotional email newsletter, which we refer to as a spotlight email, includes promotions for your publication and other services. For editorial email newsletters, we recommend designing it to be responsive using the email stack template.

A print (or digital) newsletter subscription is a weekly, monthly, or quarterly publication. It can be delivered through the postal mail and physically held, read, and paged through. A digital newsletter is read online, either through a PDF format, or a newsletter subscription website.

A newsletter subscription website is set up solely to sell subscriptions for a related print – or, even cheaper to produce, digital – newsletter. Often, the site also provides access to issues of the newsletter. A newsletter subscription website is commerce-based, with an overall objective of increasing product sales and providing customer service to existing subscribers. These sites are fairly simple: Usually the home page consists of a free area, with content that focuses on the benefits of becoming a subscriber to the related publication – a sales letter – and conversion architecture where a visitor can subscribe.

Some newsletter sites have a password-protected private area, where paid subscribers can view an HTML version of the current issue of the print or digital newsletter or download it in PDF format, as well as access and/or download back issues and other premium content. Like all premium models, a newsletter website is typically paired with an affinity (free) model like a portal or community which promotes the newsletter website.

No matter whether you’re just starting a subscription website or you already have one of the Internet’s successful subscription websites, you can learn and do more with your subscription website after you read my new FREE handbook, Subscription Website Publishing: The Most Profitable Subscription Website Models.

Use Website Floaters to Increase Email Conversion Rates

Use Website Floaters to Increase Email Conversion Rates

Don Nicholas • November 8, 2021

When website users are asked whether they like pop-ups, they say no. They'll say they hate them. They'll tell you they're the most annoying things on the Internet. They might

How To Find the Best CMS for a Magazine

How To Find the Best CMS for a Magazine

Don Nicholas • November 8, 2021

There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all content management system. The best CMS for a magazine should be built with a publisher in mind. After all, you have a different

Digital Magazine Marketing: 8 Ways to Promote your Digital Magazine Website

Digital Magazine Marketing: 8 Ways to Promote your Digital Magazine Website

Don Nicholas • November 5, 2021

If you’re making plans for your own digital publication, it behooves you to also plan how to make money from it with strategic digital magazine marketing. After all, buying a list

How to Start an Online Magazine With These Five Strategies

How to Start an Online Magazine With These Five Strategies

Don Nicholas • November 3, 2021

Knowing how to start an online magazine requires first understanding the differences between an online magazine and the dozens of other publishing models available to you in the 21st century. These

How to Promote your New Digital Magazine Issues

How to Promote your New Digital Magazine Issues

Don Nicholas • November 1, 2021

Because an amazing amount of work goes into producing each new issue of your digital magazine, promoting each issue should leverage the unique content included in that issue. We can spend hours researching and discussing the

How to Promote a Digital Magazine: 12 Strategies and 1 Major Must-Do

How to Promote a Digital Magazine: 12 Strategies and 1 Major Must-Do

Don Nicholas • October 25, 2021

How do you usually promote a magazine? Subscription and newsstand sales are the keys to driving advertiser interest in print magazines, but how does that change in the digital world? Blow-in

25 Email Design Best Practices for Publishers for Mobile and Desktop

25 Email Design Best Practices for Publishers for Mobile and Desktop

Don Nicholas • October 20, 2021

It’s been reported that the average email users spends at average of 51 seconds on each email newsletter they read. If this average pertains to your market, you need to

10 Little-Known Subscription Business Model Facts That Can Increase Revenue

10 Little-Known Subscription Business Model Facts That Can Increase Revenue

Don Nicholas • October 20, 2021

Most of the subscription business model facts you usually hear likely pertain to percentages and numbers that don't apply to you and instead reflect someone else's business. But the ten facts below

How to Create the Right Organizational Structure for Multiplatform Publishing

How to Create the Right Organizational Structure for Multiplatform Publishing

Don Nicholas • October 18, 2021

Multiplatform publishing is the cornerstone of what we do at Mequoda. If you can create one content product, you can create many content products. If you've been following along with

How Free and Controlled-Circulation Magazines Are Using Haven WordPress CXMS

How Free and Controlled-Circulation Magazines Are Using Haven WordPress CXMS

Don Nicholas • October 13, 2021

Back in the 1990s, many publishers distributed their controlled-circulation or free magazine as a download from their website or something they would send out as an attachment to an email.

Premium Digital Newsletters are Becoming the Latest “New” Old Digital Format

Premium Digital Newsletters are Becoming the Latest “New” Old Digital Format

Don Nicholas • October 11, 2021

The revival of premium digital newsletters has unsurprisingly begun. Some of us have been expecting it for a while. We can see this re-emergence as major brands vie for position

Does Email Contact Frequency Impact Email Engagement and Retention?

Don Nicholas • October 4, 2021

Little-known fact: If you send out an equal number of (1) content-rich email newsletters and (2) straight product spotlight promotions versus sending only promotions, email engagement improves. In fact, the

Free Email Newsletters Are Hot

Don Nicholas • September 6, 2021

I continue to read with interest how free email newsletters are the hot new thing. A recent Digiday article shared that The New York Times, who has 15 million email

An Informal Approach to the Best Website Design Review You Can Conduct

An Informal Approach to the Best Website Design Review You Can Conduct

Don Nicholas • August 20, 2021

As someone who's looked at your website every day for a long time, you probably have no business reviewing your own website. There are probably things in the back of

How to Sell All-for-One Subscription Products with a Membership Offer and Increase Online Profits

How to Sell All-for-One Subscription Products with a Membership Offer and Increase Online Profits

Don Nicholas • August 16, 2021

Some of your customers will want one of your products, and others will want more. But how many will buy the first and never return, and how can you generate

40 Ways to Sell Digital Magazine Subscriptions

40 Ways to Sell Digital Magazine Subscriptions

Don Nicholas • August 13, 2021

We currently operate more than a dozen digital magazine publishing systems in partnership with some of the country's leading content brands including Prime Publishing, Yankee Publishing, and Cabot Heritage Corporation.

The Best Email Newsletters Stack Content

The Best Email Newsletters Stack Content

Don Nicholas • August 11, 2021

When you go responsive, it makes you focus on your top one to three primary goals. I can't tell you what your goals are, but I can tell you how

How to Lift Your Freemium Conversion Rate With Freebies People Actually Want

How to Lift Your Freemium Conversion Rate With Freebies People Actually Want

Don Nicholas • August 11, 2021

Do you know what your freemium conversion rate is? Email is by far, the most profitable marketing channel most publishers use. So it’s no surprise that building an email list

Why Every Magazine Publisher Should Publish Email Newsletters

Why Every Magazine Publisher Should Publish Email Newsletters

Don Nicholas • August 9, 2021

A few weeks ago, I read an article from Peter Houston at What's New in Publishing that said email is the ‘Comeback King’ of digital publishing. That's a far cry

The 14 Best Words That Get People to Open Email

The 14 Best Words That Get People to Open Email

Don Nicholas • August 9, 2021

Do you know how to get people to open email? In a presentation called The Science of Email Marketing that we attended a while back, analytics nerd Dan Zarella said

Understanding the Five Website Archetypes

Understanding the Five Website Archetypes

Don Nicholas • July 26, 2021

Choosing the right business model and supporting infrastructure for any business is a key strategy for business success, especially in website publishing. Gas stations, supermarkets and bookstores are all retail businesses.

5 Quick Tips for Writing the Best Email Subject Lines

5 Quick Tips for Writing the Best Email Subject Lines

Don Nicholas • July 16, 2021

The best email subject lines provoke open rates and persuade subscribers to read your email newsletters There are dozens of methods, tricks and tips for writing great headlines. Unfortunately, this isn't

17 Ways to Sell An All-Access Magazine Subscription

17 Ways to Sell An All-Access Magazine Subscription

Don Nicholas • July 5, 2021

According to our own surveys, 42.4 percent of adults with access to the Internet subscribe to at least one digital magazine. Maintaining consumer interest over an extended period is a

3 Most Deadly SEO Mistakes and How to Fix Them

3 Most Deadly SEO Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Don Nicholas • May 10, 2021

An easy fix for the top five SEO mistakes These innocent mistakes may be costing you the highest price of all - better search engine ranking. If you want to

Are You Missing These 8 Digital Magazine Publishing Fundamentals?

Are You Missing These 8 Digital Magazine Publishing Fundamentals?

Don Nicholas • April 26, 2021

Suppose you are in the digital magazine publishing business. In that case, you may be using a myriad of media platforms for acquiring, engaging, and retaining free and premium subscribers.

Five Keys to a Profitable Sales Letter Landing Page

Five Keys to a Profitable Sales Letter Landing Page

Don Nicholas • April 23, 2021

Make sure your landing pages answer this question for your users: "what's in it for me?"

The Best Email Management System for Publishers

The Best Email Management System for Publishers

Don Nicholas • April 23, 2021

Managing email marketing has become an increasingly critical issue for every type of business. Publishers, like everyone else, use email to communicate with customers and prospective customers, on a regular

The Secret of the Four-Legged Stool for Selling Digital Magazine Subscriptions

The Secret of the Four-Legged Stool for Selling Digital Magazine Subscriptions

Don Nicholas • April 21, 2021

The four-legged stool technique for marketing your business was developed originally by Bill Bonner of Agora Publishing, specifically for selling financial newsletters. However, these four elements also work when selling

Three Types of Content You Can Publish Daily

Three Types of Content You Can Publish Daily

Don Nicholas • April 7, 2021

Typically we find that content falls into three buckets: news, evergreen, and blockbuster. Most Mequoda partners publish these three content types daily because each type serves a different purpose. News content

7 Steps for Increasing your Google Visibility and Website Traffic

7 Steps for Increasing your Google Visibility and Website Traffic

Don Nicholas • March 16, 2021

Increasing your website's Google visibility and doubling or even tripling your website traffic in 12 months is a scientific process. More than 15 years ago, we created a step-by-step program

Increase Subscription Revenue with a Credit Card Recovery Program

Increase Subscription Revenue with a Credit Card Recovery Program

Don Nicholas • March 8, 2021

Sometimes the subscription revenue you’re missing doesn’t come from new customers at all, it comes from your existing ones through the reprocessing of failed credit card renewal transactions so that

How to Increase Subscription Sales from a Single Product

How to Increase Subscription Sales from a Single Product

Don Nicholas • March 5, 2021

As a publisher, you're no stranger to tiered pricing. The question is, is your highest priced tier the most purchased item, or the least? For most publishers, when they price

How to Build a Subscription Management System

How to Build a Subscription Management System

Don Nicholas • March 3, 2021

If you’re a publisher who maintains multiple websites, making the correct choice of a subscription management system is one of the most important decisions you'll make, because doing it over

9 Fast Ways to Bring in New Revenue

9 Fast Ways to Bring in New Revenue

Don Nicholas • February 25, 2021

Because multiplatform technology is an evolving, changing target, publishers are limited only by their imagination—and tenacity—when it comes to creating new revenue streams. It’s manifest destiny in the digital age.

How to Double and Triple Email Revenue in a Few Weeks

How to Double and Triple Email Revenue in a Few Weeks

Don Nicholas • February 18, 2021

Improving email revenue? I certainly didn't learn that one in school, and you probably didn't either. In fact, in four years of journalism school, I never even had a single

How One Publisher Gets Top Email Capture Rates Three Ways

How One Publisher Gets Top Email Capture Rates Three Ways

Don Nicholas • February 16, 2021

If you want to improve email capture rates, you have to know three things: What it is, and the many ways you can test to improve it. But it's always

Beyond Paywalls: 3 Ways Magazine Publishers Sell More Subscriptions

Beyond Paywalls: 3 Ways Magazine Publishers Sell More Subscriptions

Don Nicholas • February 16, 2021

Since most magazine publishers are competing for these dollars and losing the battle, the need for revenue from subscriptions increases every day.

Sell More Magazine Subscriptions Online Using the Mequoda Method

Sell More Magazine Subscriptions Online Using the Mequoda Method

Don Nicholas • February 11, 2021

At Mequoda, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s not the traffic that comes to your site, which is the prevailing view

Going Global with Web Libraries, Collections and Editions

Going Global with Web Libraries, Collections and Editions

Don Nicholas • January 28, 2021

“Our global audience is not interested in another local news source...Our signature journalism is the biggest draw.” These were the words of a former associate managing editor at The New

How to Create “Special Collections” in a Web Library that Attract and Retain More Subscribers

How to Create “Special Collections” in a Web Library that Attract and Retain More Subscribers

Don Nicholas • January 12, 2021

When walking in to a massive library or bookstore, it's hard to decide what to look at without becoming instantly overwhelmed by all the possibilities. The same goes for an

Giving Magazine Subscribers What They Want By Prioritizing Content Over Ads

Giving Magazine Subscribers What They Want By Prioritizing Content Over Ads

Don Nicholas • December 17, 2020

Last week I was emailing back and forth with my friend and colleague Jack Edmonston, who often sends interesting news my way with some thoughts to pontificate on. This time

Double Subscription Revenue With an All-Access Offer

Double Subscription Revenue With an All-Access Offer

Don Nicholas • December 17, 2020

Are you still selling your magazine on one platform? Sure, print magazines smell good and even look good on a coffee table, but the most successful subscription and membership marketers

How to Make Your Magazine Library More Valuable

How to Make Your Magazine Library More Valuable

Don Nicholas • December 10, 2020

If magazine libraries and magazine memberships are being combined with magazine subscriptions to transform the publishing industry into a growth medium, magazine libraries are the nexus of this trend. In this

Subscription Marketing: How to Write a Winning Offer-Driven Spotlight

Subscription Marketing: How to Write a Winning Offer-Driven Spotlight

Don Nicholas • December 8, 2020

In the past we have reviewed how to use the concepts of Six Sigma in subscription marketing and testing and then creative offer testing for subscription pricing. We have shared the success

What is a Subscription Marketing System?

What is a Subscription Marketing System?

Don Nicholas • December 3, 2020

Did you know that a sunflower is not just one flower, but more than a thousand small flowers, all stuck together on one head and a single stalk? Even what

How Much Should You Invest in Your Membership Website?

How Much Should You Invest in Your Membership Website?

Don Nicholas • December 3, 2020

Few things fascinate subscription website publishers more than the relationship between cost and revenue for the various operational centers inside their business. We have long known for instance, that editorial

Should You Put Subscription Revenue First?

Should You Put Subscription Revenue First?

Don Nicholas • December 1, 2020

Headlines have been brimming lately with news publishers like The New York Times, The Guardian and Wired taking back their profits with paywalls and paid content. The New York Times

How to Triple Your Response Rates with a Web Library

How to Triple Your Response Rates with a Web Library

Don Nicholas • November 19, 2020

Would you like to triple the response to your current email promotions and sales pages? Because that's exactly what we're seeing happen when publishers stop promoting their magazines and start

Webinar Today: This Audience Development Webinar and Discussion is Free

Webinar Today: This Audience Development Webinar and Discussion is Free

Don Nicholas • October 14, 2020

Do you want to know how to use organic and paid programs to build an audience that is five or even 10 times the size of your largest paid subscription

30 Go-To Email Copywriting Tips for Subscription Marketers

30 Go-To Email Copywriting Tips for Subscription Marketers

Don Nicholas • June 9, 2020

There are a few places you can make really good, or really bad first and last impressions in your email copywriting. Get these right and you’ll build loyalty from the

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