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May 5 · Issue #3 · View online |
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Hello, all— Hope everyone’s having a great Month 2 of quarantine! May your spouse be a skilled impromptu barber…
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Every person who subscribes to this newsletter gets a welcome email from me with 2 questions: 1) Do you have a newsletter/blog/media site? 2) What’s your biggest challenge? It’s been so interesting hearing from everyone about what they’re working on and what challenges they’re facing. It’s been so interesting, in fact, that I’m trying a little experiment this month… If you’d like to schedule a free, 30-minute consultation, I’ve blocked out 30 minutes a day from tomorrow through May 15, and you can grab a Zoom spot.
Just click here — Calendly will show you the open slots, and you can reserve one with a couple clicks.
Just tell me what you’re up to, and I’ll offer some guidance if I can — and, if I can’t, I’ll try to point you in the direction of someone who knows more about your problem than I do. Below, I address the biggest challenge most people come to me with: Growth. You’ll find some of the best growth tactics I’ve come across in my time in media — some of which will hopefully be applicable to you or your organization. In the meantime, stay safe, stay sane… and stay on offense.
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As mentioned above, everyone who signs up for Newspackr gets a welcome email from me with 2 questions: 1) Do you have a newsletter/blog/media site? 2) What’s your biggest challenge? The top answer to #2, by a country mile, is always: Growth! How do I grow my newsletter? How do I get more people to sign up? How do I find the people who will be interested in what my newsletter has to say? I’ve spent a lot of my career helping companies and individuals grow audiences and email lists. So here are some top tactics that I’ve seen work — in order from free to low-cost to fully paid. 1) Have the signup link everywhere
This is mostly for independent writers, but publications and brands may be able to use some of this as well. The basic idea is that anyone looking you up or interacting with you should a) see that you have a newsletter, and b) be able to sign up for it easily. That means:
- Link in email signature
- Link in Twitter bio
- Link on LinkedIn (you can now add a ‘featured’ section to your profile… this is a great place to link your signup page)
- Link in Facebook bio
- Link in Instagram bio
And here’s a little bonus idea, pinched from the Newsletter Creators Group: Create a pinned Tweet inviting people to sign up for your newsletter, leaving your DMs open to accept people’s email addresses. Like this:
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Instructions to create the button are here. You’ll have to add the addresses to your list manually, but people have been seeing some great results. You can do a similar pinnable trick on Facebook pages with the “Get Messages” option when you create a post.
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2) Text-to-Join This is where you have people text a keyword to an access number and collect email addresses via text. This is how it works… You get a keyword, subject to availability. Say your newsletter is about coffee, and you manage to get ROAST. You then ask people to text ROAST to your provider’s number (which will be a five-digit number, like 55-444, just to make up an example). Then, you program the response the user will get — usually a very short welcome message from you. Lastly, you ask them to text back their email address, and… BOOM, they’re subscribed! This tactic is great for live events and local community organizing (think, using it on a poster in a coffee shop, etc.). But, of course, since live events are on hold for a bit, you can also use them in:
- Zoom meetings and webinars
- On Instagram
- On printed materials (like business cards or a print magazine)
- On a receipt or invoice
- In a print, radio, or TV advertisement
- On the side of your business vehicle
I used this tactic for a local nonprofit and was amazed how many of our signups came through this channel. People always have their phones on them, and it can create a sense of urgency to complete the task — they might remember your keyword, but they’re going to need to enter that 5-digit access number while they’re looking at your sign or ad. This one may take a little creativity to deploy, but the cost is relatively low. You’ll pay based on volume, but $20-$40 a month is roughly what you’ll be looking at to get started. Most providers also usually have a free trial and/or pay-as-you-use plan.
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3) Referral programs Basically, you grow your email list or online following by getting people to refer your product — usually by offering them tiered incentives as they refer more people. It can be as simple as creating a waiting list for a new product and letting people move up in line as they refer friends. Or you can offer more concrete incentives — t-shirts, mugs, credits in an online store — as people hit 3 referrals, 5, 10, 25, 50, etc. While many of the early practitioners of this tactic built their own tools, it’s now relatively easy to get something off-the-shelf. Most of these can be set up without a developer — and on the premium plans, you can get rid of branding from the vendor. Expect costs in the neighborhood of $40-$240 a month, depending on the plan. High-volume campaigns may incur extra charges. And, of course, think about the value of your referral rewards as part of your customer acquisition costs. If you send out a t-shirt at a cost of $12, and it yields 20 referrals, you’re getting those new leads at 60 cents a piece.
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4) Sweepstakes Sweepstakes are a major tool many media brands use to grow their email lists. Basically, you partner with a few brands in adjacent spaces to yours, you set up a giveaway with a decent-sized prize (a vacation, a laptop, etc.), and everyone cross-promotes it to their email lists and social media. At the end, you have a pool of email addresses from people who entered, and all of the partners get access to that pool of emails. This can yield hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of new emails. You have to be careful about how you add these emails to your list (engagement can be low, since these folks signed up to win a prize), but you can also find a pool of real, new customers/readers. Finding partners is the toughest part. And that’s why a few companies have entered the space as platforms to match partners. Think in the range of $100-$500 a month for a platform subscription, depending on your plan. And you have to contribute money for prizing in almost all sweeps — if you’re small (and thus aren’t contributing many emails to the pot), you can sometimes make that up by shouldering a bigger portion of the prize.
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5) Content-to-Capture This is a paid Facebook/Instagram strategy — so, your ability to scale this will depend on what you have available to spend on ads. That said, even a relatively small ad budget can fuel appreciable growth. In short, you create a Facebook lead ad with the image and headline from your article. When people click to read the article, they’re asked to sign up in Facebook’s native lead form. The advantage of this is that the information is pre-populated by Facebook, which of course already has your name and email address (and relationship status and favorite TV show and pet and pet’s favorite TV show and…). After entering their info, the reader is sent on to your article — and you’ve got a new email lead you can nurture with a great welcome series. Also: Do you want to spy on what your competitors are doing for lead acquisition? Use Facebook’s new ad transparency libraries to look them up! To find a publication’s or page’s ads, go to the page, find the Page Transparency box on the right rail, click “See More,” then click “Go to Ad Library” in the bottom right.
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Click 'See More,' then 'Go to Ad Library'
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But wait, there’s more! Growth is always a steep hill, but hopefully these tools and tactics can help you climb.
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7 smart moves for your media business during coronavirus
The world has changed, but that doesn’t mean it’s stopped for your media business. You still want to find ways to grow, survive, and thrive.
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The 1,000 most popular topics on Flipboard
Flipboard is a great platform for publishers. But how can you find the readers interested in your topic? With new data from Parse.ly, it’s possible to map the top 1,000 most popular topics — in order of how much traffic they send to publishers.
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Great email subject lines: This is what 9,673 tests have taught me
Great email subject lines have certain things in common. This is how to write an email subject line that will get opened.
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The 3 best stories about finding your audience…
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A five-day plan to grow your newsletter
To help you grow your newsletter, Josh Spector put together a five-day plan you can follow to “tune up” the way you position and promote it in order to attract more subscribers.
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The Art of Email Marketing: Earn Customers & Make Superfans
There are no corporate owners of email. Not even nation-states. It’s free. You own the asset you build. You decide how to operate: what to write, and to whom. A mini-course to master the art.
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6 tips for acquiring high-value newsletter subscribers
Running a successful newsletter program requires more than just great content; It requires smart user acquisition, engagement, and retention strategies.
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The 3 best stories about keeping your audience…
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The perfect email 'envelope'
We all want our subscribers to open our emails. So how can we increase those open rates?
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Email Is a Platform
Tips for thinking about email as a platform to improve your engagement strategy and have higher open and retention rates for your newsletters.
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U.S. email marketing benchmarks for 2020: by day and industry
Email marketing benchmarks by industry, open rate, day, and more. Data taken from millions of emails sent out by U.S. organizations in 2019. How does your email stack up?
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The 3 best stories about generating revenue with your audience…
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Here’s how 15+ member-driven organizations are adapting membership appeals, events, and more for coronavirus
Here’s how 15+ newsrooms around the world have adapted their membership appeals, in-person events, and roles as community connectors in order to respond to coronavirus.
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6 steps publishers should take during the COVID-19 pandemic to drive long-term revenue growth
Engaging with readers now and guiding them through the funnel — even if it is with something as simple as a newsletter signup, registration, or mobile app download — is betting that over time the customer’s long term value will be significant.
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Piano Webinar with TechCrunch: Building and Growing a Successful Subscription Business
Make sure to create enough quality content for potential subscribers, find out what is impactful for your audience and what drives subscriptions. TechCrunch doubled the number of Extra Crunch articles and increased promotion during the first nine months after launch.
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TheSkimm cuts 20% of staff amid coronavirus pandemic
TheSkimm, a news-curation company known primarily for its current-events newsletter, is laying off about 20% of its staff of about 130 employees.
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The New York Times’ morning email newsletter is getting an official 'host and anchor'
Can any of the lessons of The Daily’s success be carried over into your inbox? And, at 17 million subscribers, is this the biggest email newsletter in existence?
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Apple News hits 125 million monthly active users
During the pandemic crisis, active users of Apple’s news platform hit an all-time high. On an earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared that Apple News had reached 125 million monthly active users.
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Stuck at home with little to do, news consumers are surging toward hobbyist magazines
Health, food, and home and garden titles, among others, have seen an abundance of readers and social media engagement amid the stay-at-home orders.
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Bustle Digital Group receives federal coronavirus loan
The publisher of Bustle, Nylon, and Mic was approved for a $7.5 million Paycheck Protection Program loan earlier this month. Various venture-backed publishers have received such funds, while many bootstrapped publishers have not.
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1. Mailbrew: Email digests on your favorite topics
Create beautiful, automated newsletters with content from the sites and apps you love.
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2. Good Copy: Email copy from great companies
At a loss for words? Want to see how the best brands communicate via email? Check out this searchable database.
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3. 👌 Snapfont: Browser plugin to help you try out fonts on live websites
By Using Snapfont, you can instantly preview any Google font, local font, or a custom font on a live website.
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As a service to readers, Montague Street Media compiles guides to the best resources for media makers…
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