marketing

Is Your Newsletter...Newsworthy?

Not all newsletters are created equal.
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Ian McKinnon

· 5 min read

There’s a lot of newsletter hullabaloo in the media universe. It can feel like everyone is riding the e-newsletter wave. And as your trusted newsletter aficionados, we’re here to give you a lesson—actually, three lessons—on how you can up your newsletter game and effectively utilize the inbox to grow your audience and build your brand.

1. Morning Brew Masters the Email Grapevine

Let’s start off with a company we know pretty well: Morning Brew. More specifically, our referral program. Referrals are Morning Brew’s bread and butter when it comes to expanding our audience. Today, reader referrals significantly supplement our growth, accounting for 30% of our 3 million subscribers.

Here’s the spiel on how our program works: When you refer someone to one of MB’s newsletters and that person signs up, you win sweet prizes like crewnecks, mugs, and pint glasses. This creates an incentive for our readers to share the Brew. It’s kinda like our beloved readers network for us, and we love them all the more for it.

While we’d like to think we’re pretty dang smart, it doesn't take a newsletter genius to know that people are more willing to try...pretty much anything if someone they know and trust recommends it.

So take the time to understand your audience and what kind of referral or rewards program could complement your newsletter. We aren’t saying to copy us, buuuut we aren’t telling you not to try your hand at a referral program. And if you do, here’s another pro tip: automate it!

In the past, tracking referrals was a manual, time-consuming daily task at the Brew. That is until we were blessed with Sailthru’s unique Lifecycle Optimizer flows and custom fields and templates for each checkpoint in the program. This allowed us to automate the referral process and spend that time thinking strategically about how to use that data to inform other, more important decisions.

2. Associated Press Leaves Readers Wanting More

The Associated Press (AP) knows how to tease—in a good way.

The AP is one of the largest and oldest newswire services in the US, but that doesn’t mean they’re still reaching people by carrier pigeon (although that’d be cool). Their newsletter, AP Morning Wire, reaches the inboxes of millions of loyal subscribers every week.

Now here’s the juicy part: By using Sailthru's power of data feeds and automation, the editorial team at The AP decreased production time and increased onsite engagement—just by teasing articles via email instead of giving readers the whole story.

Shortly after implementing Sailthru and changing the format of its newsletters from full story features to only teasing articles, pageviews went from around 15,000 to 165,000 in a day!

Sailthru can help publishers identify what types of content are most engaging to their audiences and deliver more of them. For example, if your audience is really into, we don’t know, say, avocados, it doesn’t make sense to feed them content about space travel. We just made that up, but you get the point. That way, folks get the stories they enjoy reading, and publishers (like The AP) are able to send more relevant, engaging messages that ultimately lead to long-term revenue and more meaningful subscriber relationships.

Become smarter in just 5 minutes

Morning Brew delivers quick and insightful updates about the business world every day of the week from Wall St. to Silicon Valley.

For you data crunchers, the results are pretty crunchy.

By empowering the organization’s editorial mission and employing smart automation and onsite acquisition strategies, The Associated Press has seen its subscriber base grow from 150,000 to more than 725,000 in just a few months. CTR rates jumped from a 2.5% percent average up to 9% or more across these sends, inspiring the company’s B2C business to its most successful quarter ever.

3. NY Magazine Goes Beyond the Inbox…

Newsletters are a great way to drive brand awareness and shine a light on your media company. New York Magazine used their newsletter, One Great Story, to drive subscription growth across the entire publication.

How did they do it? By thinking outside the (in)box.

One Great Story points readers to the best stories on New York Magazine’s site and features content from the New York sites Intelligencer, the Cut, Vulture, Grub Street, and Curbed. In other words, One Great Story subscribers get a taste of the range of topics and story styles featured across New York, including the print magazine and its online expressions. By driving newsletter subscribers to its website, New York Magazine uncovered a strong conversion rate to becoming a paid subscriber within 90 days after signing up.

Moral of this news story: Newsletters can be a tool to drive subscriber growth across your entire organization. New York Magazine partnered with Sailthru to figure out which topics One Great Story readers enjoyed most, the largest group (30%) ranked longform features as their top choice, followed by news analysis and profiles (20%). This helped New York Magazine take action and drive One Great Story readers to more of the content that suited their taste, while simultaneously introducing them to New York Magazine’s full plate of offerings. Here’s the happy ending—they were able to convert newsletter readers to paid subscribers.

Time to get your newsletter act together

Newsletters can be a powerful tool for media companies to establish robust connections with their audience, expand their reach, and grow revenue. But in a world where lots of places are creating stellar content, reaching people takes intelligence and ingenuity—which is exactly what Sailthru can send your way.

Become smarter in just 5 minutes

Morning Brew delivers quick and insightful updates about the business world every day of the week from Wall St. to Silicon Valley.