Making a good newsletter even better

We recently went through a redesign of the Atlassian newsletter. The newseltter, we decided, had become long in the tooth, it was time for a refresh. I’ve read up on Newsletter design at MarketingSherpa and other sites, and our team had a pretty good idea for how we wanted to see it evolve.

But before taking the plunge, we wanted feedback from our subscribers. What do they think about it? Are we the only ones bored with the design, or are others hoping for a change? Can the content be improved, and if so, how?

Over 100 people responded to our survey that went to newsletter and blog subscribers. Here’s one of my favorite replies:

Generally, I regard the Atlassian newsletter as one of the best produced by any company. A good blend of company news, products news and things of general interest.

Wow! Others concurred.

Only that it is about the best I have ever seen in ANY company – (x30 or more I have seen). Also that it has jumped and improved a lot more in the last 5 months, from my outward perspective. You guys are rockin’it! But you know that. Keep it up!

Nice clean, feature rich, informative and well organized.

It is great. In general I think Atlassian is my favorite design/structure of all my various newsletters. I also really like the random links at the end, usually I find 1 or 2 really useful links.

It wasn’t all rosy — there was a good deal of constructive feedback too. We’ve posted more comments and displayed the before/after design on the Atlassian Blog. Curious readers can subscribe to the Atlassian newsletter here. Our next steps are to monitor clicks and open rates to see if that improves over time.

If you’ve re-designed your newsletter lately, please let me know, I’m very curious to see more examples and learned how others have done it.