"Thanks for joining the blogging tips newsletter and grabbing an excerpt of Blogwild.
I was wondering what is your biggest question about blogs?
Let me know.."
Andy Wibbels
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This is the welcome email I received after confirming my subscription to Andy's blogging tips e-news and it is a great model for nonprofit and foundation e-news welcome emails.
Research tells us that your audiences are highly engaged just after they subscribe to your e-news. After all, they are opting to receive email from your organization on a regular basis, which shows a significant level of interest. And, at the moment of subscription, your organization is top of mind.
Andy capitalizes on that short-lived attention focus to ask his subscribers what is they're most pressing question on his core expertise. Here are a few audience research strategies your nonprofit can put to use in its e-news welcome email:
- Discover what your audience is most interested in learning about in your e-news or RSS feed, like Andy does
- Develop a better profile of your readers, by asking them to complete a brief reader survey
- Ask your readers' opinion on a current conflict or topic in the issue area in which you work.
One tip -- and a way Andy can increase his responses: Ask for an immediate response and include an email or form link. Make it easy for your readers, and catch 'em while they're paying attention.
Don't forget the other key element in your e-news welcome email: Ask your readers to 'white-list' or protect the email address used to send the e-news. Otherwise, they may never get it and you'll have lost one interested prospect.
Source: http://www.gettingattention.org/my_weblog/2007/02/get_to_know_you.html
About the Author
Nancy E. Schwartz helps nonprofits succeed through effective marketing and communications. As President of Nancy Schwartz & Company (http://www.nancyschwartz.com/), Nancy and her team provide marketing planning and implementation services to organizations as varied as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, and Wake County (NC) Health Services.
Subscribe to her free e-newsletter "Getting Attention", (http://www.nancyschwartz.com/getting_attention.html) and read her blog at http://www.gettingattention.org/ for more insights, ideas and great tips on attracting the attention your organization deserves.
NOTE: You're welcome to "reprint" this article online as long as it remains complete and unaltered (including the copyright and "about the author" info at the end), and you send a copy of your reprint.
