I spent yesterday morning putting together Seven Days NOW (Notes on the Weekend), our weekly email newsletter. We started doing it in January. We send it out each Thursday afternoon, using email manager Constant Contact.

How many of you out there are using e-newsletters to communicate with readers? There was a good thread about this on the AAN web listserv a few weeks ago, and I signed up for some then, including ones from the Chicago Reader and the Orlando Weekly.

But I want more!

Post your email newsletter sign-up pages to this comments thread, so we can all subscribe.

And please use the comments to share your experiences — what works, what doesn’t, where you go for tips or info on best practices, etc. Feel free to post critiques, too.

We started doing a weekend email newsletter because we wanted to highlight Seven Days as a weekend resource. We also wanted to drive people back to our website after the paper appears on Wednesday.

It looks like other papers use e-newsletters as a CliffsNotes version of the paper. NOW is a little different; some — but not all — of the content in the newsletter comes from the newspaper. The spotlights are often different from the ones in print. This means more work for me, but it lets us give more coverage to cool stuff that we like but for whatever reason couldn’t promote in the paper. Not sure this is the best way to do it, but it’s what we’ve been doing.

Interesting features:

• Each week we highlight three or four “staff picks.” We display a picture of the staff person, along with a quote about the event. We also give a link to their past picks, so you can see what kind of events they like. People seem to like the personalized nature of the recommendations. Also proves we’re real people, not a faceless media corporation. Everyone can submit recommendations, EXCEPT for display ad reps, because it could potentially create a conflict of interest with a client.
• We include a list of the week’s most popular stories on our website: We can’t yet show this list on our website, so we put it in the newsletter (we get the data from Google Analytics). People do click on the stories, and readers definitely notice it.
• We feature a personal ad of the week and classified ad of the week: This was the least popular feature in a recent reader survey, but there have been weeks when the classified ad was the most clicked-on item in the newsletter.
• This has been a great way to promote our blogs and video. It makes much more sense to promote online content online, while people are sitting in front of a computer, rather than in the print paper.

Sometime soon I’m going to start adding a link to a “How I Got That Story” 2-minute audio interview with one of our writers. Someone suggested it at the convention.

What other brilliant ideas we should steal?