QUITE a week full of milestones. Started out with a birthday (thanks Steve M for the Vintage 1942 virtual t-shirt!), then preps for the twin celebration of the 5th Anniversary of this weekly newsletter, which by sheer co-incidence is also the 250th issue.
And to crown it all, the news that the Blue Plaque we had commissioned to mark the 25th Anniversary of Service Dealer last year to commemorate the life of Edwin Budding, the inventor of the lawnmower, has now been sited at the original Phoenix Works near Stroud and on a building now occupied by Stroud Brewery!
NEWSLETTER SUCCESS
We kicked off this Newsletter on 1 November 2009, and have published every week since then apart from Christmas and New Year editions.
The newsletter is put together by Steve and myself. Sometimes we get to Thursday and wonder how the heck we are go to fill it with the 10 or 12 stories that we always aim to include – but by Friday we are often having to decide what to drop out!
The 'open-rate' of near 50% we achieve with Service Dealer Update (the percentage opened of the total sent) is way, way above the average for similar e-mails in virtually every other sector. And the satisfying aspect is that we constantly get told that people grab a coffee in the office and sit by the computer at mid-day on a Friday, waiting for the e-mail to drop into their in-box and provide their fix of up-to-date industry news.
The last task before we publish is to decide which order we are going to place the stories. Steve and I often have a bet (a pint!) which will be the most opened news item– and I can tell you there is no cast-iron formula and we are often totally wrong.
For instance, last week, the lead story was the news that AGCO were to hook-up with the LTA scheme. An important story, but in the end it proved to be only the 10th most read item out of the 12 news stories we covered.
At the other end of the scale, our And Finally story often gets top ranking which tells you something about the appetite of our readers for the off-the-wall stories. And of course, a focus on people always scores highly. People who have succeeded, people in new jobs, people who have retired, people who have sadly passed on. People like to read about people.
We hope you always find something of use in our weekly newsletter. Below we give you a few facts and figures to flesh out the sheer volume of information provided over the past five years – together with a reminder of the most-read e-mails from the past 5 years.
YOUR VIEWS PLEASE
And we’d like your views on the usefulness of the weekly e-mail, what you like, what you don’t like. and ideas on how we might improve - and we have a case of Budding Ale courtesy of Stroud Brewery to be won in a prize draw for those you complete the Survey
