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Seven Steps to Building Out Newsletters by Michael Liss (VP, Product, New York Post)
- 1. Seven Steps toBuilding Out Newsletters Michael Liss VP, Product
- 2. “Email is themost valuable traffic source by miles.” Google News Consumer Insights After analyzing 1,000 news GA accounts
- 3. ● Brand lovers:100x more valuable than casual readers ● 80% of user value is generated by 20% of users
- 4. INMA Newsletter Report Emailis a direct relationship between the news media company and the reader... Email is personal, controllable, and predictable. Newsletters feed the need to rally around consumer habit and frequency.
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- 6. For subscription brands CondéNast’s data science team built a model to predict which factors best determine whether a NewYorker.com reader will become a subscriber. Whether someone was a newsletter subscriber was the No. 1 indicator. Newsletter subscribers are twice as likely as regular New York Times readers to become subscribers.
- 7. For subscription brands Newsletterrecipients are 50% less likely to churn Newsletter recipients are more highly-engaged ● Higher scores across frequency, articles read, interactions, recency ● One-third of most-engaged readers receive newsletters – Five-month study
- 8. 7 Steps toBuilding Out Your Email Program
- 9. 7 steps tobuilding out email 1. Get your house in order
- 10. Get your housein order ● How’s your email platform? ● Evaluate your current offerings and templates ● Perform list hygiene ● Check your deliverability
- 11. 7 steps tobuilding out email 1. Get your house in order 2. Determine your format
- 12. Formats ● Link-based ○ Automatedor curated
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- 14. Formats ● Link-based ○ Automatedor curated ○ Internal or combination
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- 17. Formats ● Link-based ○ Automatedor curated ○ Internal or combination ● Self-contained piece
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- 19. Self-contained: Wash. PostThe Daily 202
- 20. Formats ● Link-based ○ Automatedor curated ○ Internal or combination ● Self-contained piece ● Pop-ups
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- 22. Formats ● Link-based ○ Automatedor curated ○ Internal or combination ● Self-contained piece ● Pop-ups ● Triggered series
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- 24. 7 steps tobuilding out email 1. Get your house in order 2. Determine your format 3. Find your voice
- 25. Find your voice “Emailis kind of like a living room. It’s a very personal space.” Dan Oshinksy Founder, Inbox Collective Former Director of Newsletters, The New Yorker and BuzzFeed
- 26. Find your voice Originalreporting or essays special to the newsletters are a staple, and the voice and tone writers use are distinct from those of journalism found on other platforms... Many of those who write and edit the newsletters are particularly interested in how they can be used to engage with readers — more directly, and less formally... A reader’s inbox is valuable real estate... It’s a place where The Times can have a one-to-one relationship with the readers, and we respect that. “What’s in a Newsletter? At The Times, There’s a Secret Sauce” – NYT, 7/9/18
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- 30. 7 steps tobuilding out email 1. Get your house in order 2. Determine your format 3. Find your voice 4. Find your low-hanging fruit
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- 34. 7 steps tobuilding out email 1. Get your house in order 2. Determine your format 3. Find your voice 4. Find your low-hanging fruit 5. Then expand
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- 38. Expand your offering Emailsdon’t need to be mass products. Total subscribers isn’t the goal. Engagement is.
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- 40. Expand your offering Trump’sFirst 100 Days Five weekly versions aimed at different communities ● 100,000 subs in <100 days ● 30%-60% open rates ● 46% of subscribers became long-term readers – MediaPost, 6/13/17
- 41. 7 steps tobuilding out email 1. Get your house in order 2. Determine your format 3. Find your voice 4. Find your low-hanging fruit 5. Then expand 6. Drive list growth
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- 45. 7 steps tobuilding out email 1. Get your house in order 2. Determine your format 3. Find your voice 4. Find your low-hanging fruit 5. Then expand 6. Drive list growth 7. Always be optimizing
- 46. Always be optimizing ●Mobile!!! ● Subject line ● Pre-header ● “From” name ● Content selection ● Amount/length of content ● Send times ● Intros vs. no intros ● Template format
- 47. But don’t takemy word for it... NOT A NEWSLETTER A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails http://notanewsletter.com
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Editor's Notes
- #2 Email is as old as the internet and used to be used primarily for old people to forward really bad jokes in all-caps. But it’s still one of the most important tools we have today, and something that’s gotten much more attention over the last couple of years, for very good reason.
- #3 Recently the Google News Consumer Insights initiative studied 1000 news GA accounts, and they determined that email is the most valuable traffic source by miles. If you take one thing away from my presentation today, make it this thing I took from someone else.
- #4 They found that your biggest brand loyalists are worth 100x more than the casual reader, and that 80% of the user value is being generated only by 20% of your users, on average. That 20% is the pocket that we need to make sure we’re really focusing on. Those are the people who are coming back to us day after day. Those are the people we need to be growing the habits of and converting them to whatever our goals may be.
- #5 International News Media Association released a report with some great case studies,interviews and data, looking at a bunch of different newsletter programs, and they set it up really well… [and predictable]... all of which are really important things, because with email, you are controlling the message, what you are sending to your readers; you are controlling how they’re going to consume that, you are controlling where you’re going to send them. [and frequency.] Habit and frequency are how we get our casual readers to become our fans. And it’s how we get our fans to become our brand loyalists. And it’s how we keep our brand loyalists as brand loyalists, which is where we find our greatest user value.
- #6 Changes in privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA and other forthcoming state laws, plus changes that have already been rolled out in leading browsers like Safari with ITP before we even get to the major changes in Chrome coming up in less than two years makes the importance of known users, and first-party data and segmentation more important than it’s ever been. Newsletters are a key way of moving users from anonymous to known.
- #7 For subscription brands, this is even more important. Both Conde Nast on behalf of the New Yorker and the NYT ran separate studies and came to similar conclusions. Though this really applies to any conversion you’re trying to achieve, including just creating brand loyalists and driving habit, the same underlying user actions as would feed subscription
- #8 Certainly there’s a chicken-and-egg thing here, but nonetheless, that is the segment that you want to continue to grow and continue to retain. The WSJ thinks in terms of days engaged with any touchpoint, and this is a major touchpoint
- #9 So we can see there’s real value to having a strong newsletter program. Now we’re going to talk about how to build them out.
- #10 Whatever you’re doing on email right now, make sure you’re doing the right things before expanding.
- #11 Make sure you’re in a strong position to scale, that you trust your platform as someone who is going to help, that you have the tools you need for creating emails, solid list health and deliverabliity, understand what is working and what isn’t working with your product offerings and templates. Start from a point of strength, or at least a good understanding of what is strong for you and what needs to be changed. Make sure you’re getting the data you need, make sure they’re going to be a partner. Make sure your design is smart, this is a great time to redesign. Deliverability and list hygiene is a bit technical and can drive you crazy, but it’s very important. You don’t want to be sending emails to people who haven’t opened in 270 days, you don’t want to be seeing a lot of hard bounces. It’s a good time to make sure your lists are nice and clean, your deliverability is good and you’re ready to expand.
- #12 Your format will be informed by your content, ultimately, so this and the next step are in conjunction with each other. But let’s break down the main formats we see for newsletter templates.
- #13 Link based, the one we all might think of first, where the goal of the email is to drive the reader from the email back to the website.
- #14 The automatic email is still drawing from website curation, so it’s not just the most recent stories, but there isn’t additional work necessary just to support the email. Whereas for Decider, all of the products are curated. With this weekly email from Decider, the product is specific to what shows and movies users should stream that weekend, so it’s carefully curated, with a nice intro to be more voicey and inclusive. The intro provides some great additional real estate; those links can perform as well or better than the links below.
- #15 Some of my favorite emails aren’t just going back to articles written by that publication. It’s really curated across the web. That builds a product that you know is going to have a lot more breadth, a lot more depth. I know there’s a lot more I might find there. There’s a very strong trend towards viewing the newsletter as a service and value proposition to the reader and including relevant external links, not just links back to one’s own site. This can help drive loyalty to that service and brand, and open rates with the newsletter because the user knows the email can be a deep, well-rounded read every morning, and not limited to a single publication’s output. ESP IF YOU DON’T PUBLISH 200 STORIES A DAY. Maybe you only have three articles on a specific topic you published that you want to include, but you can still build a really good product around that and add a lot more to it as well.
- #16 If you’re at this conference and you’re not getting this, please sign up now. You can feel free to not listen to me for the next five minutes while you’re doing so, I don’t mind. I think it’s that valuable a newsletter. I know I can rely on this email every day to know the important things that people in my space are doing or talking about. And therefore, I’m going to be opening that email every single day.
- #17 Same idea, but flips the order, with the external links first. They’ll address some of the big stories of the day externally and then dive into their own top stories, sometimes mixing in Recode or other Vox brands in the top section as well. They also have a nice kicker feature called “this is cool” at the end of every email, that helps you get to the bottom. That’s a delight factor, because let’s not forget, we’re trying to delight our readers. But also it’s a little reward as a reader to get down to the end of the email.
- #18 The email itself is the product, the value that you’re providing, the commentary, the reporting, the value they’re trying to provide to you is being provided in that email. The main goal is not sending you somewhere else, though they do frequently contain links back within the copy. This can be reporting or commentary that is original to the newsletter, that rounds up other pieces from the same or outside publications.
- #19 You never knew that you were fascinated by paper clips until the paper clips edition of Quartz Obsession shows up in your inbox. This offers a dive each day into something you may never have considered. Again, there’s that surprise and delight factor each day seeing what’s going to be featured. It’s a really interesting idea and has been monetized via sponsorship since launch
- #20 This is a single email, not even the whole thing, and this is the desktop width, not even the mobile. This is the longest email I get, too long to read all the way through, but they make it very, very easy to skim and it covers a tremendous amount of ground. They know you’re not going to read this entire thing, but they make it so you can spend a little bit of time with it and get a lot from it. It’s almost the only thing you’d need to read that day. It’s too long to read the whole thing, but that’s not necesarliy the goal. There’s a great deal of mixed media.
- #22 Pop-ups are another big trend, allowing a publication to focus on a particular subject you may have a lot of content around, whether it’s an event, a news cycle, a season, a show or movie and so on. It lets you shine on a spotlight on the content you’re generating around that, engage with the users you have who are interested in that. It also promises a different relationship with the reader, more like when you’re casually dating someone you only have one thing in common with. You don’t have to make a commitment, you can have fun around that one thing and know that you’re both moving on soon.
- #24 BuzzFeed has done a great job with these email journeys. They call them courses. It’s a great way to package evergreen content or create something original that can be evergreen, which come over a short term starting at the time the user signs up.
- #25 With email, it’s very important to remember that it’s a different relationship. You hear “voicey” a lot as a term used in the context of newsletters, and it’s an important thing to develop.
- #26 It’s a much more intimate relationship how we are speaking to, how we are interacting with, how we are engaging with our readers when we are in their inbox. It’s very different than how we have interactions with our readers on our website. You need to let that guide your thinking.
- #27 55 emails with 14 million subscribers. Times Insider piece. A great example of this is the Smarter Living series, where he will talk about things in one newsletter, he will get an entire cycle of responses from readers about that, and then he will take those responses as a basis for an entirely new newsletter. You can really see that interactive engagement between the writing and readers. Be very mindful of the voice that you have going into this space.
- #28 There are many great examples to choose from, but one great voice-driven newsletter that many of us here may already get is Reliable Sources. This feels like it’s coming directly from Brian, not from a faceless media outlet. It throws to other writers within the newsletter or when they’re subbing for him.
- #29 We have finally just got here ourselves. That header image is actually a gif where she tips her glass back and forth and winks at you. And as with other voice- or personality-driven emails, we really wanted to own that this was Maggie’s, and not just another link-based automated newsletter.
- #30 We have finally just got here ourselves. That header image is actually a gif where she tips her glass back and forth and winks at you. And as with other voice- or personality-driven emails, we really wanted to own that this was Maggie’s, and not just another link-based automated newsletter.
- #31 You don’t need to start with being really innovative. Start with what you know. Start with what works for you.
- #32 When we looked to expand, we wanted to walk before we ran. Our biggest newsletter was our morning email, so we rebranded it, redesigned the template and then the first thing we introduced was:
- #33 The Evening Update, which is the Morning Report at night. We publish more than enough and the news cycle is more than fast enough that this was going to be a really great place for us to start exploring how we could roll things out further. And it quickly grew to having very meaningful scale. And then we wanted to figure out what would be a really good vertical to start something section-specific.
- #34 For the New York Post, a lot of people think about sports, so that was going to be the first vertical we were going to do. And that was a really great place to start. You know your data, you know your audience, you know your content. You have a lot of easy things you can do. Start there with your low-hanging fruit, and see how you can build it up.
- #36 These were the original products we had across the three brands.
- #37 We expanded slowly at first with this low-hanging fruit.
- #38 Then we looked at what other content we had that was differentiated and had strong readership around. This put us in a good position to start thinking in different directions about where else to take our program, and to drive list growth as a whole.
- #39 The thing about when you start to expand is that emails don’t need to be mass. They can be niche. The goal here is not to have the most subscribers we can possible get on the lists. It’s not about chasing overall size. The goal here is activate the engaged segments of users that you have around the content that they’re most engaged with. It’s about driving engagement and habit. It’s about feeding the 20%, and the various pockets that make it up, not the 80%.
- #40 You can be niche and still be very effective. HuffPost does a really great job of this. Mixed in with some of their wider-appeal newsletters, they have things that are definitely targeting certain things that they cover and their brand does a great job of owning, and certain parts where they know they have really great users. They don’t need a lot of people to be signing up for each and every one of these to be very valuable for them.
- #41 A really great case study from HuffPost… Every week they sent five different versions of a newsletter that they felt were going to be very affected by the new administration. You could sign up for one of them, you could sign up for many. 30-60% open rates -- even at the low end of that, it’s well above industry average. They were able to convert this audience to sign up for other newsletters or kept coming back to HuffPost, because again, we’re trying to build consistent habit.
- #43 On-site list growth is your most important source, but do it correctly. How many times do you land on a website for the first time and are immediately confronted with a newsletter sign-up modal before you’ve even be able to read the story? That’s like going up to a stranger at a party and saying, “Hi! What’s your number? Can I call you, every day, forever?” When they’re like, “I’m sorry, what’s your name?” It’s annoying and it’s distracting them from what you want them to be doing, which is reading your content. If someone is a first-time visitor from a third-party referrer, they don’t even know you yet, let alone want to be in a long-term relationship.. They are not a qualified lead. You have to be mindful of Next Back Action. In this case, the user is likely not going to be coming back, so the most valuable thing you can try and get from them is one more click on a piece of content before they go, not a long-term commitment. Save the sign-up modals for people who already have more experience with you.. And if someone has clicked into your website from a newsletter, please don’t show them a modal to sign up for a newsletter as soon as they get there. Not only is that annoying user experience, it’s kind of insulting. It’s like continuously reintroducing yourself to your next door neighbor. It’s insulting - you don’t recognize me? I see you every day! I thought we were friends!
- #44 For us, though, one really important tool is, how are you going to find readers as you introduce new email products? Well start with the email readers that you already have. A really great place to start is emailing your current subscribers that you have these great new products. And don’t only highlight the new things. Make sure to highlight the rest of what you have. When we were introducing new products, we found we got more list growth than we’d expected from those announcements for our older products. It was really valuable to have made sure that we included them.
- #45 Going back to Dan from the New Yorker, he says “email is easy, but driving list growth is what’s really hard.” I’m going to outsource this completely to him. He shares this wherever he goes and he’s happy to have me share it here as well.
- #47 Email provides lots and lots of data, and most platforms are very easy to run A/B tests. It gives us the opportunity to always be optimizing. To make the point about mobile, make sure that all of your emails are really easy to read on mobile, because that’s where the majority of emails are consumed. The interplay between your subject line and preheader is an important way of how you’re trying to drive readers to open. The other thing to think about with subject line is where you’re putting your keywords. If you think about it on mobile, you’re only getting this amount of space. So make sure the part that’s going to drive your readers into that email is in the front. You have to be really clear on word choice and word order. Small changes can lead to big gains in open rates of click-throughs.