Hello to all the Story Empire readers, PH here today. I hope everyone had a good Father’s Day weekend and good time spent with family.

If you’ve tried running a newsletter, you may have sent out a message and looked at the results, hoping for lots of opens and clicks in your statics. Instead, you see moribund results with few opens, clicks and a higher rate of unsubscriptions. Just a few weeks ago, I shared tips to improve getting your newsletter into inboxes and out of spam folders, even avoiding some of those dreaded unsubscriptions. Today, I’ll share a few tips that may get you a few more opens when you send messages and possibly mitigate readers from unsubscribing.

Often, when you send and how often you send may provide you with better results. Here are a few ways to address these two issues:

1. Send on a specific day of the week and try to stick with  a schedule. Some people find Sunday mornings work well, others on Monday. You have to test this some, something I’ll discuss a little more along in this post. You can figure out the best day for you and then use that information to improve your overall results.
2. What time of day you send can affect how many opens you see from your subscriber list. Ever notice when you get email messages from Amazon or BookBub with suggestions about books to read or notification about a new release? Those are often timed for early evening and those companies have specific information about the effectiveness of time. Again, you can test this by trying different times to discovery what works best. I’ve sent my messages out around 5PM on Mondays and gotten improved results, at times seeing some bounce in sales of my books.
3. Segment your subscriber list into four groups, then send out weekly throughout the month. Here’s where your testing comes into play. You can schedule sending the same newsletter edition to each segment, testing different days and times. You can even test the different segments to verify previous results. Once you have a good idea what days and times provide the best results, you then send to each segment assigning each one a particular week of the month.

Now for a word of how this works together. As I mentioned, results can raise the number of opens when working to eliminate the problems mentioned a few weeks ago.  You may see more opens but not many clicks to your books but actually see number of sales improve. This happens because people may not click anything, but go search for you or your titles on Amazon and then buy. However, you may also see more clicks in general too.

As an additional bonus, you might reduce the number of unsubscriptions by making note in the newsletter of why the subscriber is receiving the message. A reminder like this can help gaining more regular readers along the way since it helps people remember. Some people add this at the beginning or end of the message. You can also get people to make sure they are getting your messages in their inbox by asking them to make sure your address is added to an approved contact list with instructions. This is generally done with an onboarding series of messages over time – usually in the initial greeting message.

One more additional tip to keeping people reading, make your newsletter easy to follow and read. Try  only using links as necessary in the body, usually one or two. If I share additional information about giveaways, I place these at the end of the message. I’ve also started including a series like a short story in the body rather than via a link since it gets people reading fiction content and might draw them to click on book links or go look the titles up. The less you require interaction for the main point of the message the more engagement you may gain and keep.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll share more about newsletters  next week but take a look at the previous post for some very useful ideas to tweak your newsletter for better results. What is your experience with sending your newsletter as specific days and times or if you’ve tried these tips? Have you tested your newsletter and what where the results? Please leave your thoughts and questions in the comments section and I’ll respond as soon as I can.  Let me know what questions you have that I can address in future posts. Thanks for stopping by Story Empire today and taking time to read this post.