At the PPA Festival in May, there was an interesting panel discussion on newsletters.
‘Inbox impact: turning newsletters into subscription engines’ was chaired by Letterhead’s Chris Sopher and the panel consisted of Andrew Lee (FT Specialist), Hannah Williams (The Londoner) and Jenni Allen (Which?).
Below are some of my takeaways from the session:
- Make sign-up frictionless. Move away from annoying pop-ups and try to put sign-ups in more contextually relevant places. This might involve giving editorial teams the ability to embed sign-up links at suitable places within articles. And, don’t try to collect too much data at sign-up – initially, just the email address is enough. Further information can be appended to the record as the relationship grows.
- Trust the metrics! Always, including when deciding on frequency. How often to send newsletters is a subject for hot debate. Is daily too much? There’s a natural tendency to worry about over-emailing people but you should rely on the data to help you make frequency decisions. If the metrics are strong, then it’s worth sending. If they’re not, it’s not.
- Make sure your newsletter has an objective(s). In the past, for some publishers, simply having a newsletter was sufficient. That box was ticked. That’s no longer good enough. Each newsletter needs a clearly articulated objective (or two). Newsletters are the Swiss army knife of publishing – they can do a lot of different things: lead generation, relationship building, conversion, retention of existing subscribers, re-engagement with lapsed subscribers, reader and commercial revenues.
- Clean your lists! Only send your newsletter to engaged readers. Recipients who never engage should be purged. Keeping them on damages your reputation and skews your metrics. Quality not quantity.
- Consider newsletters’ potential to be a product in its own right, not just a marketing tool. For The Londoner, edited by Hannah Williams, the newsletter is the product. The Londoner is email-first. The newsletter is what people subscribe to.
- Invest in it! Newsletters work! According to Which?’s Jenni Allen, “about a third of our new subscribers last year were acquired through our newsletter audience.” And newsletters were proving equally successful for retention: “We have half a million paying members and 400,000 of them take at least one newsletter, many of them take many more than that. And it’s just a huge opportunity for us to deliver regular value to them.” With the increasing prevalence of zero-click searches and the at-arms-length relationship publishers have with their social media followers, the one-to-one relationship email newsletters have with readers is incredibly valuable. They have invited you into their inboxes! It’s a privilege. Treat the invitation with respect, reward them with incredible content, and reap the benefits.
Newsletters are an increasingly important part of publishers’ operations.
As FT Strategies’ Andrew Lee said: “We have a number of different models, a number of different strategies, but what I would say is that we don’t have a product that newsletters are not a really central part of what we’re trying to do.”
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