A lot of my readers are on my newsletter subscription list.

Different from my RSS feed, I only send newsletters when I have some news to share or a special event coming up.  In other words, I don't send a newsletter out on a regular, scheduled basis.

I've tried different approaches to my email newsletter.  Announcing a contest before it's launched, asking for votes for one of the various blogging contests, and sending out a poll.

But then I realized something.  It occurred to me that my readers subscribed to my newsletter because they want to receive an email from me.  And after a recent email newsletter I sent out, I figured out what those newsletter readers find most compelling.

Story telling.

And no, I'm talking Puff the Magic Dragon or the Three Little Pigs.  I'm talking sharing what's been happening in an anecdotal way.

What do I mean?

The last email newsletter I sent out, I shared some major changes going on in my life right now and while I told the story, I linked to the related posts in my blog.  I was able to elaborate more and offer a more personal perspective while keeping the newsletter short and concise.  If the subscriber wanted to get more context...the link was there, directing them to the relevant post.

My usual traffic driven from an email newsletter to my blog more than tripled.

Now I'm not a mind reader so I can only offer a guess as to why it happened this way.  I think that as we subscribe to more and more blogs our feed readers get overwhelming and sometimes we sacrifice reading great content in exchange for keeping our feed reader's contents at a manageable size.

By crafting my email newsletter in this way, I was able to condense all my recent posts and put a personal spin on them.  The end result was telling a story and offering more if the subscriber wanted as much and an easy one button delete if they were happy to just catch up.

I'm definitely going to start doing this more, maybe every couple of weeks as another way to engage and connect with my blog readers.

I use MailChimp after trying lots of other email newsletter providers.  I like that you can either pay as you go or get a monthly unlimited email at a set price based on number of subscribers.  If you are interested in trying out MailChimp, you can get 30 free credits (and give me 30 credits at the same time, we both win!) by signing up using my referral code.

I've been using MailChimp for a while now and as my subscriber base grows so does my plan (I do the monthly plan).

Want to see what I mean?  Sign up for the Jessica Knows blog newsletter now!

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