Email newsletter – Target Marketing

The Skimm reached seven million subscribers in seven years. The Hustle hit half a million subscribers, growing by 5X in just 12 months. Morning Brew announced their one millionth subscriber last February and grew revenue by $10 million in one year.

The media industry is no stranger to this email product wunderkind. Publishers have seen the success stories of the early aughts (like beloved DailyCandy) and more recent brands that began as standalone newsletters, such as Goop, Tasting Table, and Thrillist. The recent explosion of profitable businesses founded once again on email marketing can’t be ignored, either.

Yet for many media companies, email is still an afterthought — a stale, under-resourced part of their business.

In Support of Email

Despite its long tenure as a digital stalwart, email is growing. The global email audience is projected to increase from 3.8 billion in 2018 to 4.4 billion by 2023. Not only that, more than 60% of people say that email is their preferred channel for communication from companies, more than all of the other channels combined. This includes Millennials and younger generations.

Perhaps the most important point about email is that it’s a fully owned channel that gives publishers a direct line to their readers, thus creating an opportunity to collect and target using first-party data.

So why haven’t all publishers done more to nurture these relationships? Legacy uses, like subscription marketing, often take up a lot of send volume. Email databases often sit with the marketing team, leaving content creators with virtually no access to performance metrics. Any content innovations get squeezed into a publishing schedule that already stretches a small audience too thin.

Growing that small audience is a classic “chicken or egg” problem: It’s hard to justify the resources needed for a better email product without the revenue to back it. Growing your list (and revenue) is near impossible without a good product in place.

Treat Email as a Product

Of course email is a channel, but it’s also a product, and to grow your list, it should be treated as such. There are small steps publishers can take to start productizing email.

Find one or two people who straddle creative and strategy and hand over the keys. Give them the control to centralize all email activity going to the email database and track the value over the long term. Understanding what to get rid of can free up space to start sending more interesting new emails to the current list. Even better, try performing a longitudinal analysis. It might become clear that email subscribers have a higher potential lifetime value than social media fans, and resources can be moved over.

When it comes to your content, what gap can the email product can fill? It’s time to stop cutting and pasting from the website. The Skimm was created for educated millennials that wanted a hit of breaking news that they could read on the way to work. The Hustle promises to make people smarter in five minutes with quippy news about tech and business. NextDraft is written by one man, Dave Pell, who visits about 75 sites each morning, pulls the 10 most fascinating stories he can find, and then distills them in a witty way.

These newsletters are succeeding because smart product owners are filling a niche with email-specific content for a like-minded audience. This concept is not groundbreaking, but it is smart, and can be replicated.

Compose a Growth Strategy

Sweepstakes bait is not the answer to growing your list. Nor is forcing people to submit their email in order to finish an article. The point is to grow organically by building relationships with the people who like what you have to say, and want to hear from you by email.

The Skimm’s famous Skimm’bassador program rewards fans with real items like t-shirts and tote bags because they know that word of mouth really is the best path to organic growth. (Now compare the cost of a decent t-shirt to your CPA from Facebook and start taking this seriously.) If your email owner happens upon a great content niche, engaged fans will let you know. Involve them in a dialogue. The Skimm gives shout-outs to readers in the newsletter and on social channels. Find your brand’s way of connecting to your audience that excites them and engages them. You might be surprised how excited they are to hear from you.

Borrow from marketers who create multichannel engagement with their customers. Find ways to convert your social fans into subscribers by highlighting great bits of content from the newsletter and poignant feedback from subscribers on social. You can even share podcast series recaps, similar to how The New York Times offers behind-the-scenes of its podcast, The Daily, via email, along with an online overview that includes links to related reading and a place for listeners to comment. They even take it one step further with a private Facebook group called The New York Times Podcast Club, “basically, a bookclub for podcasts.”

Reduce Risk

The best thing about email is also what makes it so overlooked: It’s stable, safe, and it’s been around a while. These qualities have led publishers to undervalue an important channel for too long. Yet email is the one channel (after a website) that is wholly owned by the publisher, and it’s the best channel for creating lasting and personalized relationships with readers. When you think of it this way, carving out some extra love for email makes a lot more sense than the multi-million dollar investments needed to turn out video, branded storefronts, custom merchandise, or swat teams dedicated to new platforms like TikTok.

Now’s the time to unleash a creative junior staffer. Bring insights together to reevaluate the content you send. Convert loyal subscribers from other channels. Find a niche and place a bet with a new email product. Don’t have the resources? Sailthru and other ESPs focused on media and publishing often have customer-facing staff available to help with this kind of initiative. Try something, anything! Then give it time to grow.

Taking a leap of faith on a channel that has proven to grow and provide ROI for countless other industries should be an easy decision.

Content marketing isn’t just about results — it’s about profit. And the more efficient your content marketing, the more profitable.

One way to amp up your efficiency is to get more out of each piece of content you produce. This requires attention to two areas of content marketing: adapting content for different formats and promoting your content across multiple channels.

Adapt Content for Multiple Formats

The “adapt or die” imperative isn’t as dire for content marketers as it is for, say, an animal trying to blend into its surroundings. But unless you’re blessed with unlimited resources, you’ll need to think tactically about each piece of content. The content you’ve developed for a blog post, as an example, could also be used in a range of other formats:

Case studies
Whitepapers
E-books
How-to guides
Webinars / slidedecks
Infographics
Podcasts
Videos
Interactive assessment tools

Adapting a piece of content to different formats assumes that the content itself will be transformed in some way to fit the new medium. You don’t want to just read your blog post into a camera and call it a video.

The adaptation helps reach more of your audience in the ways they prefer. Different segments of your audience may be graphics-focused, while others love video or prefer all the details laid out in text.

To some extent, the content formats you choose to adapt with will depend on the nature of the content itself. Not everything lends itself to a case study or an infographic as readily as you might like, though that doesn’t mean you can’t re-use the content as part of a broader case study or infographic.

As you plan to adapt a particular piece of content, your top consideration should be how to best use the new format’s strengths. You should also think about how any new format might highlight different aspects of your content, and whether that varied focus will help you connect better with different audience segments.

Promoting Content Across Channels

Publishing your content, in whichever form(s), is just the beginning. Once it’s published, it’s time to promote it.

In other words, publishing puts the content in content marketing. Getting the word out is the marketing.

There are, of course, a great many channels to choose from when considering how to promote your content, and you’ll want to select your channels based on two criteria:

Is this a place where my target audience gathers?
Is my content appropriate for this channel?

Obviously, there’s no point in using a channel if your target audience isn’t there. No matter how brilliant the content, nor how clever your come-on, you can’t attract what doesn’t exist.

Similarly, there’s no point in using a channel if you’re not using it correctly. And by correctly, I mean by behaving within the expected norms of that channel’s community — in a way that will resonate with the audience.

Some channels to consider are:

Email newsletter
Guest blog posts
PPC advertising
Event sponsorship
Direct mail
Traditional advertising
Social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Quora questions and similar “expert” forums
YouTube and other video channels
Slideshare and similar content-sharing platforms

Each of these channels has its own strengths and weaknesses, but they should not be evaluated on those merits alone. You must also consider how well it fits into your overall content marketing plan and, frankly, whether you have the resources to do the channel justice.

Drive ‘Em Back

Whichever channels you choose, your goal will usually be to drive any interest you generate back to your website to create engagement. Engagement leads to conversion, which is the ultimate goal. Be sure your newly adapted content includes a call-to-action to encourage the engagement and conversion you’re after.

Trust Your Data, Not Your Gut

Finally, recognize that in our discussions above, we’ve made some very large assumptions about the appropriateness of various formats and channels. A strong intuition or “obvious” fit is a great place to start, but there’s no excuse for not tracking your results and backing your instincts up with data. Let the data show you what techniques and channels work best for you and your audience.

Remember, the goal is increased efficiency, not just increased activity. Data will let you know whether your activity is reaping the rewards you are aiming for.