Had a bad newsletter program, and an abysmal email raiting.
Purging lists and moving platforms
Things had gotten so bad that MailChimp was only delivering 35 emails an hour, and it would stop all deliveries after 48 hours, which meant that the vast majority of our lists weren’t going to anyone.
This was also tanking our corporate team’s ability to email, since we shared the platform.
I took some drastic steps. Firstly, I cut anyone off the lists who hadn’t opened an email in 6 months, figuring that at the end of the day, I may lose a few people, but get rid of the vast majority of problems we had. By the time I was done, the list had gone from 9k to barely 1k.
I then moved platforms to MyEmma, to give us a better fresh start than trying to build things back up specifically on Mailchimp, and left the corporate team on that platform so their would be seperation, and one group’s mistakes wouldn’t hurt the other as badly.
Then I slowly brought back things over the next 6 months on their monthly schedule until we had an account in good standing.
The next order of business was to increase our output and grow the list. To start, we redesigned the previous newsletters and created a completely different template, with far more diverse content. The goal was to turn it from a monthly to a weekly and improve the content overall.
Meanwhile, we also required more ways to sign up for it. A consistent sticking point for me was the previously, the only way to sign up for our newsletter was at the bottom of a LONG scroll on our homepage. This all but ensured our list would stay stagnant.
Instead, we moved the sign-up higher up the page. We also added a meerkat that appears 15 secs after someone new arrives on the site, and appears again within 2 weeks if they don’t sign up for the newsletter the first time. We also added an easy sign-up to all of our reports and site published content, so that we could get more sign-ups out of everyday content promotion. We also added direct calls to action on our social every week to get more people to sign up.
To create the weekly content required a bigger collaborative push. I established deadines each week for researchers to get me interesting company tidbits, for me to gather revelant news articles, as well as work with the greater marketing team to create an original piece of content each week.
While the first few weeks were rough (i.e. very late nights the night before launch) we eventually settled into a system taht worked.
RESULTS
Across the board, these efforts have been praised. Not only did we get compliments from previous readers, but within the first month, we added another 1k subscribers. Currently we steadily gain 60-100 new subscribers each week, without any paid media or social whatsoever, and we have plans do boost our efforts with money shortly.
The best part is everyone signing up is highly engaged, with our average per email ctr hovering at 33% ( occasionally reaching as high as 40%), and the averge click in the emails hovering at 14%, much, much higher than industry standards, and something we hope to hold onto as we expand this facet of our outreach.