Keeping Forum Members Engaged With A Forum Newsletter

We are relentless in our study of practices that lead to successful forums. One commonality that is shared by many successful forums is a regular newsletter that is sent to all users and highlights important and/or interesting contributions from the forum’s members. Benefits of a regular newsletter to all forum members include:

• Rewards those who make valuable contributions. People love to see their name in the spotlight and this encourages them to keep contributing.
• Brings high-value content to casual users. People can benefit from getting the most interesting content in digest format and it can draw casual users back into the milieu of the forum.
• Provides an ideal sponsorship opportunity. The site owner can sell newsletter sponsorship to advertisers.

In sum, a forum-wide newsletter is a great way to keep users engaged and to build traffic to your forum.

Sending out a forum-wide newsletter is a relatively simple task but many site owners overlook it either because it is time consuming to write or they lack the technology to send an email to thousands of users at once. With Ninja Post, our goal is to streamline the creation and sending of forum newsletters so that site owners can easily communicate the latest news from their board to all of their users.

For our busier clients, we assemble the newsletter content and provide the infrastructure so that emails can be delivered safely and accurately. There is no need to set up an account with a separate web service such as Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. We take the pain out of creating a newsletter for your forum so that you, as a site owner, can enjoy the benefits from sending a routine newsletter without any of the headaches.

Pro tip: when sending out a Newsletter, make the subject of the email something interesting from the forum (rather than a simple title like, “Forum Newsletter”.) Making an intriguing and relevant subject line will improve the open rate and click through rate. We covered a similar topic when we discussed how to write a compelling thread title.