The Art of Newsletter Design

For the past two days I have been writing and deleting major portions of Own Web Now’s upcoming newsletter. You see, we are a network operations and software development company that caters exclusively to the tech savvy audience and some of it is too stupid to figure out how RSS works, in spite of it being completely integrated in their OS, their browser, their desktop and their email agent.

These folks, many of whom fork over thousands of their clients cash to keep junk mail out of their mailboxes, would like us to spam the crap out of them. So they can be better informed? No. So they have one less thing they can complain about when things go wrong and they feel they haven’t been informed enough about it. In the recent statistical breakdown, my support staff spends half the time answering questions about crap that has been documented. They have been begging me for a “canned response” functionality in Shockey Monkey but I don’t have the time to get to it because I am sitting around designing a newsletter for people that will never read it.

Loving my fucking job… I’ve been reduced to a retarded secretary that is too slow to be an administrative assistant (I think the professional name for this condition is “PR Professional”)

Anyhow, assuming the ConstantContact messages aren’t routed straight to trash, the design of a newsletter is really a battle: uneducated PR meets idiotic marketing. Who wins? Well, the bandwidth providers that have to move all of this garbage around, so it will never be seen as more of a headline. So, I am really trying to isolate who I am supposed to cater to.

I imagine 90% of the people will junk the newsletter.

The remaining 10% will either build a rule, try to unsubscribe or forward it to someone else that will not read it.

Of those 10% I am assuming 1% will actually read it.

So, 0.1% of my total newsletter distribution will be comprised of people that:

• Read everything I write
• What the hell is this OWN thing, click..
• Oh, Vlad! Let me at least skim through it and see what he’s up to.

I am perhaps closest to that last one, meaning I will scan through some of the newsletters while the other ones I am just hitting delete while the preview window is on. I have my Outlook set to automatically download images as to make them feel good about thier job, make it seem like someone cares.

So here is what I’ve decided to do.. We’ll have a single newsletter, with a single publishing date – 3rd of the month. Why third? Well, try pronouncing third with my accent and you’ll find out the contents of every newsletter you’ve ever seen. (if you don’t get it, don’t worry)

Top / side of the newsletter will have the headlines, which is likely what anyone would be interested in even remotely (my client base is not the impulse buyer group, telling them about AuthAnvil will not open the floodgates of Amex) and the rest will be copy and pastes of stuff already found on Own Web Now Blog and Network Operations site.

Hope you have a more fulfilling day than I will…