The online ramblings of Dylan Bland

Sometimes I take a moment to reflect on the way I go about doing things, and often catch myself making life much more difficult than it really needs to be.

Take email newsletters as an example.

Monthly email newsletters are key to all of our sites. They’re the cheapest way to obtain traffic and keep our brands near the top of people’s minds.

But preparing them every month can be a real *#^!@. Actually sitting down to write them is easy because I can do that on my own in my own time, but then I need to organise the artwork, wait for that to get drawn up, send it back if I didn’t do a very good job of describing what I was looking for, then forward the copy plus the visuals through to get coded up, then proof read then finally send it some five days later. Drama!

As you can see, the end result is basically a work of art. But boy do we pay a price! Is it really worth all the time, hassle, money and stress? I don’t think so. Plus, the whole rigmarole actually puts me off sending one in the first place.

So with happysheep we tried something different. No images, no artwork, nothing but the bare bones of what we wanted to communicate to our members. And what do you know? It works. People still open them, people still read them, and people still click through to the site. In fact, I actually prefer receiving newsletters like this because they take less time to read. Just the key points with no happy text to fill the space beside a random piece of artwork!

And the best part of all? The whole thing took 30 minutes to write, and less than an hour for Shane to code up and send. Oh, and that includes building the online survey. The effort vs. reward ratio doing it this way is awesome and so much smarter for a small team such as ours. We don’t have a marketing department or an ad agency, so every minute we spend working on stuff like this is a minute we cant spend on developing the site.

Keep it simple ftw!