Diner Dave Creates an Email Newsletter

I now have almost 200 subscribers transferred over from DinerDeals.com and I am ready to send out my Diner Dave Digest e-newsletter.   In this newsletter I will combine some of my best ideas from the old DinerDeals.com “Eat-Mail” Newsletter and add blog posts and fun contests from DinerDave.com website.  

To Template or Not to Template…That is the Question

I’ve gone round and round on whether to create my newsletter using a fancy HTML template with sidebar links back to the website and include my logo for brand building.  In the end I decided to go with a plain, no graphics, newsletter.    I get a LOT of newsletters in my personal Outlook inbox and the ones with heavy HTML graphics show up as a bunch of red “x”s with “right-click here to download pictures” written all over the page.  It’s very hard on the eyes! 

I would prefer to keep it simple (for now) and give my subscribers an opportunity to view my newsletter in the preview pane without having to “right-click” to see graphics and pics.  Plus, I have found that newsletters that are heavy in graphics do not make it through the spam filters of business email boxes (half of my subscribers use their business email address).

Diner Dave Digest Content

Having some experience with broadcasting e-newsletters, I have found that you absolutely cannot send only emails with just merchant offers!  Occassionally, I will send an email with only one  merchant offer.  However, it must be a “you’ve gotta see this limited time offer before it’s too late” message. 

Every one of my email newsletters will include these 3i tems:

1)   My most recent blog posts – usually I am able to write 1 or 2 blog posts per week.  My latest blog post “Dining Out and Gift Ideas for Dads and Grads” was included in my latest newsletter.  I think it’s very important to include a couple of articles in each newsletter so it’s not just “buy, buy, buy!”   You lose subscribers REAL fast when your newsletters are just weekly sales pitches.  I’ve had to unsubscribe from quite a few newsletters for that very reason! 

2)  Merchant offers – a fella’s gotta make money, right?  But, I also help my subscribers SAVE money by including coupon codes for most of the offers on the ”Diner Dave’s Daily Deals” page. 

3)  Contests to win a free meal - After I started including a brain teaser contest where I award $25 restaurant gift certificates to 3 winners I found that more people were opening my emails.  Plus, it makes the emails more viral since they forward it to their friends.  More forwards = more subscribers = more traffic to the site!

“What’s the Frequency Diner Dave?”

I did a survey using surveymonkey.com almost 2 years ago with 8,000 subscribers of DinerDeals.com and asked them “how often would you like to receive your newsletter?”   I gave them the following options:  daily, twice a week, once a week or once every other week.  The response from 83% of them was once a week.  The people have spoken and I am listening!   When you subscribe to the Diner Dave Digest, you only get an email once a week from me…unless there is a “limited time” offer that they cannot live without! 

AWeber and the Spam-o-meter

AWeber's Spam-o-meter

I absolutely LOVE this feature on AWeber! 

You put together your newsletter and immediately after you save it, you can see how likely it is that your email will end up in your subscriber’s spam or junk mail folder.  If you get a spam-o-meter score above a 5 then it is likely that your message will be blocked by email content filters.  If you get between a 3 and a 5 then it is POSSIBLE that it might be caught by the email content filters.  Rosalind gave me a couple of great tips to keep my spam-o-meter score well below a “3″:

• Do not overuse these words:  free, win, contest, and coupon
• Avoid putting too many dollar signs ($) in your email

The problem is that I have to use these words and dollar signs in my merchant offers and contests.  However, after receiving a spam-o-meter score of 3 (email may get blocked),  I was able to pare down a few of these red flag words and decreased my score to ZERO!   This is a great tool and will definitely increase your open ratio (mine is currently 43%!).

Click on the pic below to see the entire Diner Dave Digest newsletter:

So now you know how I use my email newsletter to make money on merchant offers and to get more traffic to my site.  My next order of business will be to write a blog post on Diner Dave with a link to a Clickbank e-book offer that pays out $10 per sale.  Stay tuned for my next post on NPT outlining the results of that project.

For those of you who need to get up to speed on the “Diner Dave Diary”, here are all the previous posts:

• Introducing Diner Dave!
• Diner Dave Does Market Research
• Diner Dave Writes Content
• Designing the Diner Dave Website
• Diner Dave Works his Email Marketing Plan