Redesigning our Monthly Newsletter
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 11:00am -- Holly Wright
Those of you who subscribe to our monthly newsletter will have noticed a big difference in the design and format of the newsletter this past month. Yep, we redesigned the whole thing! I thought I would take this opportunity to describe the thought process behind our redesign for those of you who are also considering a new design for your newsletter.
First was the decision to redesign it at all. Around mid-2011, we updated the look of our newsletter, but left the content structure about the same. At this time, our newsletter contained 3-4 stories each month (usually miniature versions of some of our blog posts plus any important announcements), one spotlight section, social links, and another call-out area for whatever made sense each month. Most of these sections linked back to HannonHill.com in some way. We also had the requisite “unsubscribe” link as well as an invitation to subscribe to the newsletter for the recipients of forwarded newsletters.
What we didn’t have was a full listing of the new content on HannonHill.com that was created each month. We also didn’t provide readers with a clear indication of what was the most important information for them to get out of the newsletter.
As a CMS provider, we often discuss the merits of content marketing and content strategy, and we work hard to provide valuable content to our clients, partners, prospects and other subscribers on a regular basis. That’s why we publish white papers and case studies on topics that we have researched heavily, and that’s why we maintain a blog with frequent updates for our marketing users, technical users, and those interested in learning about our company culture. Hannon Hill team members from all departments--support, sales, services, engineering, marketing and management--all contribute to the blog, so we have useful stories and tips for our highly-varied audience.
Typically, we promote our content to our social media followers and to our RSS feed subscribers. But we kept hearing time and time again that many of our customers--our top constituents--didn’t know about new blog posts. We had a distribution problem.
So what did we do?
We decided to turn our monthly newsletter into a sort of Table of Contents with all the posts from the previous month. And instead of including rewritten summaries of the top 3-4 posts, we are only highlighting the top 1-2 items, so we can better direct the attention of our readers to the most important news. We want to make sure everyone who wants to read our content (AKA, subscribers to our monthly newsletter) knows exactly what is available for them on our site.
We also changed the layout, created a new header design, added new social buttons, and de-cluttered the previous table layout. Here’s a screenshot of the new newsletter.
Do you have feedback on the new design or content strategy? Have you redesigned your own newsletter recently? Please leave any comments for us below.
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