First, a recap (but definitely hit that link above for more details if you want them).
The recap
The benefits of every-other-week newsletters versus those of weekly newsletters:
The main benefit of switching my author newsletters to every other week is reclaiming some time since I'm struggling to find enough time in my schedule to both write/edit and make good progress on the business/marketing side of being an independent author. Each newsletter takes me about two hours to complete (update on this data below).
The benefits for weekly emails are way more substantial than every-other-week emails, including (but not limited to, again hit the link above for more info):
- I like the rhythm more than every other week (and I've never tried monthly).
- Theoretically, it helps me develop a better relationship with my readers, both in terms of more "shots on goal" (i.e. most people don't open every single email they get, so more emails = more opportunities for them to open, read, and enjoy) and in terms of readers being able to count on hearing from me every week on a specific day and time.
- The email-delivering robots like weekly emails more. I have some data from my own newsletter that supports this notion, at least after a bunch of time sending weekly (after something like 40 weekly emails). (An update on this is also below.)
Where I left it last time:
- I don't like it, but maybe I should try switching to newsletters every other week instead of weekly for a while and see how they feel. Although, I do think weekly emails are my long-term strategy.
- But what do my readers want?
What do my readers want?
Well, I surveyed them in my last two weekly newsletters, asking them whether they'd prefer to hear from me weekly (as is), every other week/twice a month, or monthly.
The initial results are:
- Weekly: 47%
- Every other week: 34%
- Monthly: 19%
Overall, my readers prefer a weekly email.
However, that is less than half that prefer that weekly email, i.e. a plurality, not the majority I'd like1.
What if I get rid of the monthly option and assume that anyone who voted for monthly would prefer hearing from me every other week to weekly?
This seems like a logical assumption I can make, even if I didn't use my preferred ranked choice voting method, only because ranked choice voting seemed excessive for such a simple question and I wanted to keep things simple.
Collapsing every other week and monthly votes into one category (and removing the duplicates of a couple people who voted for both every other week and monthly), I get:
- Weekly: 48%
- Every other week or less frequent: 52%
I didn't do a statistical analysis on this2. By eyeball, I don't see a significant push one way or the other.
On one hand, 47% of my readers prefer my current weekly emails3.
On the other hand, 52% of my readers would like me to email every other week or less frequently3.
Looking at it with an eye toward practical significance and not purely statistical significance4, 5, roughly 50% of my readers prefer weekly emails and roughly 50% prefer emails sent every other week or less frequently.
And roughly half my readers want weekly emails, roughly a third of my readers want every-other-week emails, and roughly a fifth of my readers want monthly emails.
I.e. If I stick with my weekly emails, I can make roughly half my readers happy. If I change to every-other-week emails, roughly a third would be happy, and roughly two-thirds would be unhappy, desiring either more frequent or less frequent emails6.
What about those who didn't vote in the survey?
Roughly 10% of my readers voted in this survey. Most of my readers didn't vote.7
Are those who didn't vote more likely to be casual readers and therefore desire a less frequent email?
Or are those who didn't vote more likely to be happy with the status quo, i.e. happy with weekly emails?
There's no way to know, and logically, I can go either way.
So what I'm saying is, this decision regarding my author newsletters delivered weekly or every other week can go either way according to my readers.
Which means I'm the tie breaker!
Decision time
Based on above and based on my own desire to keep things weekly if at all possible, I'm going to leave my author newsletter weekly through the end of the year and likely into January.
It helps that it's also time for the fun end-of-year emails! Like my favorite album of the year, book, TV show, etc.
Weekly newsletter tweaks
In an attempt to keep my author newsletter weekly without stealing (too much) time from my other business-side activities and/or from my writing and editing, I made a few tweaks to my current process of writing my weekly author newsletters.
1. No more perfectionist-ing! (sort of)
For the next several emails, I won't focus so hard on making sure I have something eminently click-able in every single weekly email.
There will likely be links in every email but likely not an oh-so-tempting button to click in every single email or maybe even in most emails. This is against current deliverability guidelines, where you want your readers opening, clicking, and/or replying to as many emails as possible, and buttons have been shown to be a great way to do this.
But having something juicy to click on in every weekly email takes a ton of time for me right now (or at least that's what I'm guessing). I'm hoping I can reduce the time I spend on weekly newsletters by being a little less perfect on this8 and allowing some emails to only have in-text links that make sense but that most people likely won't click.
2. Time to batch some emails! For real this time.
I'm going to make it priority to batch something like six weeks of newsletters at a time, even if that means stealing from my writing/editing time and/or my business time. (And it likely will steal from my writing/editing time.)
This has been a goal of mine throughout the last year, but I've seldom been able to make it happen due to other, more urgent things popping up and due to refusing to steal from my writing/editing time unless I'm about to miss sending a newsletter completely.
This has resulted in me stressing over getting the occasional email out on time (and then I skip my exercise time, which is not where I want to be long-term) and likely makes each newsletter take more time due to the context switching.
So, I'm going with the idea that if I steal from my writing/editing time to do my newsletters roughly twice a quarter, this isn't a big deal. Especially since I often steal from my business time to do more writing and editing.
Did it work? How I'll figure that out in a couple months…
Spending less time per email?
I'm hoping that between being a little less perfectionist on my emails (but only a little, lol, I am who I am) and batching them so I don't have to review where I was with each email weekly, I'll be able to spend less time per email.
The current stats are (to the best of my ability, gathered by my fav time tracking app, the Harvest app): 2.3 hours spent creating each newsletter.
There's another roughly half hour in there for filling out my spreadsheet tracking what each newsletter was about and for tracking data too, for a total of roughly 2.8 hours.
Decreasing deliverability?
The other metric I want to keep an eye on is my deliverability.
Like I mentioned before, the email-delivering robots like it when readers click, and my hypothesis with not focusing on always providing something obviously juicy to click on is that my click rate will decrease and therefore so will my deliverability, which will then drive down my open rate.
In which case, any potential decrease in deliverability due to moving to every other week instead of weekly might be mitigated entirely by having something juicy to click on in every twice-a-month email, which I cannot afford to do time-wise in every weekly email at this time.
If my open rates go down due to being more chill about giving my readers something click on in every weekly email, it might make sense to shift back to a more intense, every-other-week email in terms of deliverability.
Here are the metrics I can judge this situation on9:
- Open rate for my last 12 emails10: 47.5%
- Click rate for my last 12 emails11: 2.8%
- Clicks-out-opens for my last 12 emails11: 6.0%
Lastly, I'm going to check in with myself, to see how I've been enjoying writing these weekly emails and to see if I feel like I've made good progress on both writing/editing and the business-side of publishing books, etc.
And who knows, maybe in a couple months, I'll switch to every-other-week newsletters and see how that feels! I do love a good experiment.
Happy reading,
Betsy
The epic list of side notes and digressions
- For more on plurality versus majority, check out this Wikipedia article. Bonus: I didn't know that in the UK "relative majority" is the term for America's "plurality", at least according to that article.
- I could if I wanted to. I was a biomedical engineer during my first career who specialized in data analysis after all. But as part of that, I got a feel for looking at data without necessarily doing all that stats work first. And that's a skill I lean on during this author career where I'm limited on time and decent stats software as a solopreneur.
- Again, the numbers didn't quite add up due to a few readers voting for multiple options, which I handled in different ways, hence the discrepancy. And yes, handling that issue in different ways wasn't ideal statistically, but this was a rough analysis. It did not need the kind of accuracy my old biomedical engineering analyses did. (The perfectionist reminds herself. 😝)
- Practical significance versus statistical significance is the idea that something can be statistically different but hold no practical difference since the difference, while statistically significant, is too small to meaningfully change things. Honestly, this is probably one of the best things I learned during my relatively short career as a biomedical engineer.
- Again, I did no statistical analysis on this, so I have no idea if this difference was statistically significant. To do the statistical analysis would be a waste of time, since I only care about practical significance at this time (i.e. I'm looking for big, obvious differences) and I'm always super short on time.
- Why, yes, I am a people pleaser! It happens to be part of my Enneagram Type 1 personality. I do work on not letting that personality trait drive the car, so to speak, but it's also a strength, in that I want to give my readers the ultimate experience, and I have no trouble factoring in what they want and comparing it to what I want and seeking the common ground. But yes, I do have to be careful not to sacrifice my needs and wants to please others.
- This is a common issue with this type of optional survey.
- I'm a perfectionist, remember?
- In general, open rates tend to decrease with time, especially since I'm not currently adding people to my VIP readers group, so things may get a bit weird with this analysis, given that I expect open rates to decrease no matter what I do. Sounds like a problem for future-me! 😂
- This is that increased open rate I noticed after sending a bunch of weekly emails. For the 13 emails before this, the open rate was 44.4%. Starting with my 27th weekly email, the open rate increased to 47.5% (for the next 12 emails).
- Yup, my click rates are not great (a good target I've been told is 10%, though I can't find a source for this target no matter how I look 🤷♀️). I have been actively trying to boost them (they used to be 2.2% on average), but I haven't been able to make great strides. I have a plan long-term for how to (hopefully) boost these click rates a bit more—and there's a good chance things improve on their own once I'm actively selling my books—but for now, they are what they are.