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In the second of our new monthly series that aims to help you get the most from your email newsletters, Andrew Seel, MD of Qube (the digital marketing specialists) takes a closer look at the Amazing Grades newsletter.

Amazing Grades is 'the intelligent way to use the Internet for study and research'. It was launched in 2001 and has been continuously expanded and improved. It now contains thousands of web links, past papers, book reviews and audio revision guides designed to aid self-study for 14-19 year-olds.

The issue:

A recent Amazing Grades email newsletter achieved a very high opening rate, but then failed to capitalise on this achieving a low click through rate.

Amazing Grades wanted to know how they could improve their click through rate.

Andrew’s initial thoughts…

1. Why is the email titled ‘Announcement’? Looking at the content it doesn’t seem to be an announcement. This begs the question, what is the aim of the email - why should I read it?
2. What is the web link at the top for? It mentions my school - should I click it or is it an error?
3. Reading the first paragraph does not give me much incentive to read on. As a teacher in a hurry, why should I be interested in podcasts?
4. ‘What is a podcast?’ is a valid question but having the whole answer within the email doesn’t give the reader any reason to click through, therefore interest in this can’t be measured.
5. The headline ‘Mark Radcliffe on River Processes’ may make sense if I am a geography teacher, but otherwise it may put me off. There is no further information about what is contained in the podcast and the benefits of downloading it.
6. The buttons aren’t individually clickable on the podcast player - it is a graphic. Clicking takes me to the same graphic on the website, where I have to click again which is a bit irritating.
7. The design of the email does not reflect the quality of the website.
8. It seems a bit excessive in terms of space to have the whole podcast archive within the email. Also the term ‘archive’ suggests old rather than the latest content.
9. A key objective of Amazing Grades is to get people to subscribe. But this is buried at the bottom of the email. People are unlikely to read the newsletter in a linear form, from beginning to end.

See what Andrew suggested...