Condé Nast is enjoying great success with its newsletters. According to Jessica Crouch Perry, product director, newsletter traffic to their websites overtook social traffic two years ago; newsletter recipients are proving to be 4.5 more likely to convert to paid subscription and their newsletters are the largest source of traffic to their commercial partners.
Jessica was speaking on a panel session at the recent PPA Independent Publisher Conference, entitled, ‘The long read: the value of newsletters in your content ecosystem’ along with Chris Sopher (co-founder & CEO of Letterhead) and the PPA’s Mel McVeigh.
But, simply having a newsletter is not enough. You need a plan. Indeed, she said, if the business aim of the newsletter can’t be clearly defined, then it’s probably not worth keeping.
Jessica touched on some trends they were noticing at Condé Nast, in particular, the evolution of newsletters from a broadcast model to a two-way comms model, where newsletter editors were increasingly injecting character into their writing, using conversational language, giving views, asking questions and cultivating a sense of community.
Condé’s newsletters divide into three types:
- Editor – a clear editorial voice aimed at developing a relationship with the reader.
- Intro – a guide to the news of the day; a list of links but with an editorial at the top.
- Alert – a short message drawing subscribers’ attention to a big story on the website; used sparingly.
There was general agreement on the panel that having a clear business case and objectives was the prerequisite for a successful newsletter.
Therefore, for each newsletter, a publisher should, at the very least, be able to:
- Provide a positioning statement, like in an example provided by Chris Sopher: For [audience] who are struggling with [problem], [newsletter name] provides [content focus] that helps them [audience objective].
- Define success.
- Name the key metrics; eg: open rate, click rate, conversion rate, subscriber growth, revenue generated.
- Make the business case: eg: subs revenue, affiliates revenue, ad revenue, retention, engagement / conversion.
If you’re crystal clear on the above, then the chances are that you are already publishing a successful newsletter…
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
