Every online newsletter needs to stand out and capture the interest of readers. The managing director of Lyris explores how to captivate your audience using a personable, individual approach.

A successful newsletter should offer subscribers many ways to interact and inviting content contribution is one they will welcome. Look at your newsletter, and count the ways your readers can interact with you, and don't count your unsubscribe link. Instead, look for any way that you can get readers to get involved with the newsletter, your products or your company. If you found only one, or even none, then check out these strategies for ideas on how to add more ways for your readers to interact with your emails.

Great emails find a balance among interactive content, entertainment value and purchase behaviour. However, not every email message needs to follow this content-heavy format, nor does every reader seek it out.

Still, you should strive to add a little value to each email you send, whether it's your regular customer newsletter, a one-off sales announcement, company news or transactional emails such as subscription, registration and order confirmations or updates.

Offer content that is of specific interest to specific parts of your readership
Providing more in the way of bespoke content to match subjects of interest across the readership of your newsletter will take more time and effort, but will help the newsletter be much more successful. Many newsletters are guilty of being too generic in order to give something to everyone, ending up as rather bland publications, lacking depth for some subjects that are very important to part of the readership. This can be achieved through audience segmentation -- gathering data on their preferences and interests. This can quickly lead to considerably increased interest in the newsletter and more scope for sales activity as a result. The mistake made by many at this stage is to collect the preferences and then not act on them.

Carefully consider newsletter length
This remains a matter of some considerable debate among newsletter experts. One school of thought is to make them short, very relevant and suitable to be consumed in the work environment where people generally don't have a lot of time to immerse themselves in a lengthy publication. Others advocate that the overall quality of the content has a greater impact on success, even if this inevitably results in a longer newsletter. Both arguments have merit, and in making a decision it's important to understand both your objectives and the likely habits of your readers.

Add more channels to collect feedback
You should already have at least one web link and an email contact address in every email you send (along with someone at your end monitoring those locations in order to reply in one business day or less), as well as postal and telephone data. But the more channels you have, the better.

Some creative avenues for feedback:

• Short surveys: One-question quizzes relating to your product or market niche rather than statistically valid queries. Introduce the quiz in the newsletter, then link to the actual quiz on your site. Use a quiz module that shows a running vote total.
• Perennially good topics: Ask how to improve the newsletter or website; solicit new product ideas; ask how a product solved a problem or improved the user's life. Publish good replies in the next issue.

Tell your story
Everyone likes to peek behind the curtain to see how the company works and who the people are behind the email addresses or the telephone voice. Add a little storytelling to your newsletter as appropriate:

• The company picture: launch new products, announce news or highlight email-only peeks into company operations, especially fun facts, history, personnel changes and the like.

Give your newsletter a personality
This isn't the same as personalisation, where you mail-merge your subscriber's name into the subject line or 'Dear Whoever' line in the message body.

If your newsletter were a person, would it be male or female, a serious authority or the fun person at the desk next to you who's always working an angle? It should reflect either your customer base as it is or as you would like it to be.

Once you know that, you can adopt a distinctive tone and personality that guides your copywriting and topic selections. This is mainly a newsletter initiative, although you can continue it in broad terms through all of your emails.

Add customer reviews or publish the best recommendations
This one can be tricky, because you risk customers filing negative comments along with the glowing ones. To counter that, pick the most useful of your good comments and feature them in a product spotlight, on your site and in your emails. Publish and promote the link to your review site to encourage readers to file their own comments.

Next week: six more ways to engage readers

Andrew Robinson is managing director, Lyris.