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www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
How Personalized Email
Newsletters Can Increase Engagement
by Tracy Clark
mediashift.com
August 12, 2016
A version of
this guest post was originally published on the RJI blog.
Tracy Clark, a
2015-2016 RJI Fellow, believes newspapers with editor-selected email
newsletters would have better engagement rates if the content were personalized
to each user’s interest. She is in the midst of a pilot study with a large U.S.
newspaper, which is simultaneously publishing two email newsletters: one
includes editor-selected news content, the other features reader-selected
stories. The personalized newsletters are based on Clark’s Reportory platform.
This is a progress report.
I have always
believed that content personalization is superior to non-personalized
experiences. That’s why I’m thrilled that initial data from our customized news
email pilot supports my hypothesis. Time will tell once the newness wears off
on our service and we do the final analysis. Right now we are laser-focused on
subscriber growth and continue to tweak our platform to ensure an optimized
user experience.
ADVERTISEMENT
Our experiment
with a large daily U.S. newspaper has been in market for three months now. We
are sending out two different newsletters simultaneously with the same amount
of content, all aggregated from the newspaper and The Associated Press. In our
version, users select the type of content they want to see. In the publisher
version, an editor or journalist selects the content the reader will see.
We have reached
25 percent of their current subscriber base and so far the data leans toward
supporting the personalized news approach. We will continue to grow the user
base over the next three months to have six months of quantitative data on both
services. We’ll also be deploying qualitative surveys to both readerships in
order to get valuable satisfaction and preference feedback. All of this
information will be published this fall as we unveil our publishing partner and
the final results.
Readers Respond Positively to Personalization
Here’s a sneak
peak of the performance so far. During the first month, our personalized news
emails saw a higher open rate and substantially higher click-through rate (CTR)
and click-to-open ratio (CTOR) than their editor-selected news emails. These
numbers have stayed fairly similar month-to-month. We’ll release more comprehensive
data at the conclusion of the study.
Let’s compare
the performance of both newsletters against industry averages. IBM recently
released its annual email benchmarking study that
includes email performance data from 750 companies representing 3,000 brands in
40 countries. I also pulled recent stats from MailChimp, another email service provider.
For reasons unknown, both of their average open rates and CTR and CTOR stats
are well below both the publisher’s newsletter and our personalized newsletter.
This bodes well for the publisher we are working with and extremely well for
our hypothesis that personalization is superior:
Last year Digiday and others clamored over The New
York Times’ 70 percent email open rate. While that statistic is phenomenal,
they also mentioned that the Times has a 12-person newsletter staff. Many
newsrooms across the country have greatly increased the number of newsletters
they provide their readers (The Washington Post has more than 75 newsletters,
according to Digiday). I petition that instead of
deploying multiple niche newsletters that require manual editing and
publishing, that media executives instead consider investing in a content
personalization vehicle that automatically delivers personalized newsletters
for each and every recipient.
Think about the
numbers: Let’s say a dedicated newsletter editor at a medium-size publication
makes $50,000 a year and he or she oversees three newsletters with a total of
40,000 subscribers. That means that the newspaper is paying this employee
basically $1.25 per subscriber, not to mention the acquisition costs spent
marketing the newsletters and providing ongoing email provider support. If
instead the newspaper invested that $50,000 to building — or otherwise
utilizing — an email personalization platform, then there wouldn’t be
additional ongoing editor-related costs (albeit you can never forgo the technology
and marketing costs). Please don’t think that I’m suggesting newspapers fire
these newsletter editors. I’m suggesting that perhaps technology can automate
their jobs, and their talents can be re-allocated to another part of the
business that requires a human touch.
Unique Email Automation Challenges
Ultimately the
experience depends on the content, and we’ve already had some snafus on the
content based on the news feed that we have had to work through. For instance,
the feed contains both English and Spanish articles but there’s no meta tag to
distinguish language. Thus, we had to add code to detect a Spanish character
and if it sees one, remove the article from the newsletter. This obviously
isn’t fail-proof for articles on topics such as Beyoncé, for example.
Another
“gotcha” that I’m dealing with is that if there are no articles that match a
user’s preferences we revert to sending the latest articles from AP marked in
the feed as “top news” so that we can always send five articles each day for every
newsletter for research comparison purposes. However, for some reason in the
feed AP flags all of their state lottery articles (and there are a lot of them)
as top news, so that often times gets pulled into the newsletter. Someone in
North Carolina, for example, could care less about results in the Ohio daily
lottery, so I’m working now to re-code how articles get selected versus just
relying on the “top news” meta tag.
I’m not the
only one in the industry working on news personalization. Crain’s recently
announced its own nationwide email news personalization initiative
in 35 markets: “Crain’s new city brands feature smart email newsletters that
customize business news based on location, reader preferences and engagement.”
Moreover, according to Nieman Lab, The Washington Post is
deploying “pop up” newsletters based on preferences, and they’re already seeing
similar success to ours. “Click-through rates for the personalized newsletters
are three times the average and the overall open rate is double that of the
average for the Post’s newsletters,” writes Nieman Lab’s Ricardo Bilton.
I believe these
two examples reinforce the notion of news personalization, and I’ll be
following their efforts closely. More updates on our study to come this fall.
Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime.
Tracy Clark is
an RJI Fellow and founder of Reportory. As a nonresident fellow, she is
conducting usability testing on her technology platform to create news digests
for publishers’ subscribers based on individual preferences. Contact her
at tracy@reportory.com.
===================================================== For a great satire on email, please see the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zwscoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
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In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” has just been published and will be followed by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:
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Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.
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