Digging Into E-newsletters

3. Include fun stuff in the sidebars. Some of the e-newsletters we reviewed included fun or interactive features such as trivia questions or an action counter in their sidebars under the menus that linked to articles. Readers clicked on these links, despite their lower placement in the message.

4. Relocate that tell-a-friend link. Unfortunately, it turns out that friends don’t tell friends about e-newsletters. The tell-a-friend links in the messages we reviewed generated extremely low clickthrough rates of less than .5 percent. It’s possible that this is partly a result of poor placement — the majority of the tell-a-friend links in the e-newsletters we reviewed were located at the very bottoms of the messages. It’s also possible that e-newsletters are simply not urgent enough to motivate many people to forward them to a friend. But if boosting viral marketing of your e-newsletter is a key priority for your organization, try placing the tell-a-friend link either at the top of the message or near an interesting article, instead of in the footer of the message.