Newsletters and notifications can greatly benefit your website or business. With the internet being home to so many amazing websites and great content, keeping people on your website has become more difficult each year. Although mailing lists have been around for a while, they still have an amazing ability to hook people into your content and keep them coming back. However, it's important not to be spammy or annoying.
A newsletter works by having a list of emails for people that have signed up for your website. Because of this, you already know they are interested in your site's topic. Remember, you can always sign people up for your newsletter automatically when they join and offer a way for them to opt-out at a later date. If you don't do this you can appear spammy and may actually be spam-detected by major email providers - that's not good! So, always give people a way to unsubscribe from your newsletter.
You should also remember that people do not want endless emails. A good newsletter should only send out an email 1-2 times per week and always be beneficial to the recipient. You should not create a newsletter that just reminds people to log in to your site, or just focuses on your site alone. The newsletter email itself should have content that is interesting, and maybe doesn't even go to your site. For example, a tech forum could include some tech news / articles in their newsletter, and simply have a banner at the top or bottom with a reminder that they can stay up to date with tech news & discussions at YourSite.com. This serves as a great non-spammy newsletter because they've benefited from learning about some recent events without going to your site, and if that content is interesting to them, they will go to your site. You always want to leave the recipients feeling like your newsletter has benefited them, even if they close the email without clicking any of the links inside.
Notifications can be looked at similarly to newsletters because they are often done by email, but are more specific to the user. Notifications should not be frequent unless the user has opted-in for very specific notifications. An example of this would be sending them an email every time they get a Like on their content. A much more ideal notification would be "Your content was liked 74 times this week! Log in to read the discussion replies!" or "You have received a private message from...". As you may be starting to understand, you only want to send a notification for a specific event if it's important (private message) and clump statistics / information together when you can. For example if you email 12 times per day because they have 12 replies on their threads, that's a lot worst than saying "Your discussions received 12 new replies" at the end of that day. You don't want to overload them with separate notifications.
Both newsletters and notifications serve a purpose. They remind your community that your site is important and active. You do not want to overwhelm or spam anyone, you should always provide a way to opt-out of email notifications, and you should always treat your emails like they are advertisements - Don't write low quality content that is just trying to sucker them in to coming back to your site. Always provide some content that can found interesting on its own. Even the notifications can do this right. If you have a user that comes to your site every day, they may not want the notifications if they're excessive... but if you are summarizing their account's daily activity, they may stop looking at the emails as annoying notifications and see them as useful breakdowns of how their content did that day. So, keep all of this in mind with your outgoing emails and you will definitely be more successful.
A newsletter works by having a list of emails for people that have signed up for your website. Because of this, you already know they are interested in your site's topic. Remember, you can always sign people up for your newsletter automatically when they join and offer a way for them to opt-out at a later date. If you don't do this you can appear spammy and may actually be spam-detected by major email providers - that's not good! So, always give people a way to unsubscribe from your newsletter.
You should also remember that people do not want endless emails. A good newsletter should only send out an email 1-2 times per week and always be beneficial to the recipient. You should not create a newsletter that just reminds people to log in to your site, or just focuses on your site alone. The newsletter email itself should have content that is interesting, and maybe doesn't even go to your site. For example, a tech forum could include some tech news / articles in their newsletter, and simply have a banner at the top or bottom with a reminder that they can stay up to date with tech news & discussions at YourSite.com. This serves as a great non-spammy newsletter because they've benefited from learning about some recent events without going to your site, and if that content is interesting to them, they will go to your site. You always want to leave the recipients feeling like your newsletter has benefited them, even if they close the email without clicking any of the links inside.
Notifications can be looked at similarly to newsletters because they are often done by email, but are more specific to the user. Notifications should not be frequent unless the user has opted-in for very specific notifications. An example of this would be sending them an email every time they get a Like on their content. A much more ideal notification would be "Your content was liked 74 times this week! Log in to read the discussion replies!" or "You have received a private message from...". As you may be starting to understand, you only want to send a notification for a specific event if it's important (private message) and clump statistics / information together when you can. For example if you email 12 times per day because they have 12 replies on their threads, that's a lot worst than saying "Your discussions received 12 new replies" at the end of that day. You don't want to overload them with separate notifications.
Both newsletters and notifications serve a purpose. They remind your community that your site is important and active. You do not want to overwhelm or spam anyone, you should always provide a way to opt-out of email notifications, and you should always treat your emails like they are advertisements - Don't write low quality content that is just trying to sucker them in to coming back to your site. Always provide some content that can found interesting on its own. Even the notifications can do this right. If you have a user that comes to your site every day, they may not want the notifications if they're excessive... but if you are summarizing their account's daily activity, they may stop looking at the emails as annoying notifications and see them as useful breakdowns of how their content did that day. So, keep all of this in mind with your outgoing emails and you will definitely be more successful.
