Episode 18 | Subscription Accelerator™ Part 2: The Email Newsletter

This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by zine101, the makers of Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more at zine101.com where you can download Leaky Paywall for free. On the Paywall podcast, we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. Let's get started.

So is your newsletter your number two source of subscription revenue? Today we are going to, in our 18th podcast episode, talk about the importance of your email newsletter. It is the number two step in the subscription accelerator framework, number one being the free registration form that hopefully you have installed on your site and are merrily building emails. Your email list with. Now, once you have your email list growing, you want to send your newsletter to this list. Now, I talked to a couple of publishers very recently. One of them said, oh no, I don't have time for an email newsletter, which really kind of surprised me. And the second one, different publisher told me, I don't really want to pay for an email newsletter. So I know most of you guys are sending email newsletters, but I want to, we want to, Jeremy and I want to dig into exactly why it's so important. What, what are the opportunities and what should it look like and then actually how to send it out. So those are the three main areas we're going to talk about. So. Hey, welcome, Jeremy. Trying something a little bit new. We got the video going. This is going to be our podcast, but we're going to do a video format. I think it's probably got a special name for it, but we're just, we're just calling it a video podcast for the moment. So the focus is to listen in on this. We have a couple things to show you if you're, if you're viewing this via video. And so let's just jump in. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about are the opportunities of your email newsletter. And if you look around the web, you'll see very clear indication the data saying that if for every email address that you put on your newsletter and then send your newsletter to, you'll have a 10x chance of getting that person to subscribe. Now, it doesn't happen on the first try. It's kind of a farming approach where the emails get sent over time and the subscription messages get presented on your website via your paywall over time. And it's usually, no, no, no. But then at some point, if that person is constantly receiving those subscription messages, that means they're interested in your content. They've seen it enough times that you've finally broken them down, that they pay for a full access. And that's your newsletter doing the job. So your newsletter is your superpower direct marketing tool? It is. Email is today the number one direct marketing tool in the digital world by far. It's more powerful than social media. It's more powerful really than anything out there. Push notifications off of apps are powerful too. That's a whole separate discussion. But for most of us, we all have email and it absolutely works. Okay, so subscription revenue 10x, that's a big opportunity. What else happens when you grow your email list? Well, you have sponsorship opportunities. You can get an advertiser for your email list. And the bigger your list grows, the more subscribers you gain because your email newsletter is doing its job, the more you can charge for that, for that sponsorship or multiple sponsorships. When I say that email should be your number two source of subscription revenue, we say that because of the data we're looking at with our own publisher base. If it's not number two, if you're looking at your subscribers and trying to figure out where they're coming in from, and number two, it's going to be a little different from every publisher. But if it's not right up there near the top, then it's time to look at what you're doing with your email newsletter. Okay. The other opportunity is when you put up a paywall. And this is a question we get from publishers all the time, is, you know, will my traffic drop now with a metered paywall, such as our leaky paywall, as long as you're metering one article per, let's say, per month to the public, one or more, Google will index all your content and rank all your content. And any one article can be shared in social media to a thousand different browsers. It's only when the individual starts to comb through your content where the meter counts, and then pops a subscription message and says, hey, you have to pay to get access. So what's happening with your newsletter is even with a paywall in place, it's sending people back daily. If you have a daily newsletter, a week, weekly newsletter, over and over again, and that's driving traffic. So when we look at the numbers, some publishers have really dramatic results in a year, if they're really not doing a good job previously with getting their content online and emailing with a newsletter, their traffic could double easily with a paywall. Most publishers, and I'll say the Publishers on the other side actually that are doing a good job in social, doing a good job with email, they tend to see a growth rate in the 20% per month range. It's pretty significant traffic growth when you really dial in your newsletter. Okay, so there are a couple other opportunities I want to mention too. You get your email newsletter rolling to your audience. You want to get your, your, all your articles in front of, you know, free registrants, in front of your paid subscribers. But you might want to take a look at your newsletter as far as a product. You know, this is, this is something that Substack is doing really well right now and you can absolutely do it too. And a premium newsletter can be different things. One could be time based.

So.

We work with Ipolitics in Canada, political news publisher. And if you subscribe for a premium subscription, you get the newsletter early. I don't know what time it actually goes out, maybe at 6am so you get the news early versus if you're a free newsletter subscriber, you get it later in the day. And that's a pretty big benefit. I mean time is very important to us, especially when it comes to news. We, you know, maybe we need to get out the door and we want to get our news right away. The other thing that works hand in hand with that is full text email. So when we were working with them, one of the comments that they made is, that was very important to them is as people are getting ready in the morning, they want to get an email that has all their content, all the article content in it and they reserve that only for paid subscribers. And Jeremy, you were, you were in on that project. I think if I remember correctly, that's. That was the approach.

Yeah, yep. So different levels. You were, you know, whether how much it was or if it was free, you got access to different types of email newsletters, things you could sign up for.

That's right. Yeah, they had a bank of them too. I think they think they run maybe seven or eight different, different opt in newsletters. They take their newsletter strategy pretty seriously. Another thing that I'm actually going to move the screen here and check on something is archives. And so now one of the things that I wanted to do is sort of split out news. And this is kind of a simplistic approach, but just take it, take it as you wish. If you publish news, local news, let's say your newsletter is probably going to be shaped a little differently than if you're a magazine that's publishing a newsletter. So for the magazine Crowd or the longer form content crowd you have an opportunity to pull, you probably have more evergreen content and you can pull this evergreen content from your archives and as a whole new separate newsletter. And so if you're looking here, you can see Small Boats magazine, which is doing a great job with their newsletters. Supermodel. If you're a magazine publisher, I would take a close look at what they're doing and put some of their strategies to work. So this is an in between their monthly issue news and what they did here is very simple. They have a beautiful photo and they only have two articles here from the archives that they're pulling up. But the articles are related. So in other words, their, their topic is Georgian Bay and they have two articles that talk about Georgian Bay. And that's it. It's. You don't need 10 articles to go out in a newsletter. In fact, less is more in many cases. So this gives them the room for nice pictures, more excerpt text. And of course, this is the whole point. You have a title and an excerpt and then the button to continue reading or the link to continue reading. And you send people back to your site to use up the meter or use up the free allotment of articles you're giving them to trigger the subscription message. Here's the two articles. And then at the bottom are a couple things. One is the area which promotes subscriptions. So more details in terms of what you get with the subscription and the big button. And, and by the way, long text buttons like this, this is sort of a button, it's almost like a banner. But these buttons perform, they outperform links. So if you have just a side note, if you have just links in your newsletter, consider changing your links to buttons where appropriate. And then at the bottom they have their, their sponsors. And because it's multiple sponsors and they're keeping their design consistent, what I like is that they grayscaled out all their sponsor logos.

Yeah, so this is great for like you said, magazine style publishers that only, you know, publish, let's say even once a month or even less frequently. This is a great way to get those in between newsletters out because definitely sending out the newsletter when you're not a news site is a great way to get a good spike in traffic as well. So number one, you're highlighting the archive, but also two, you're reminding people that you exist because people are busy, they have a lot of things going on in their lives. And so it's not like they're coming to your site every single Day if you're just a magazine that doesn't publish very often, but this allows you to, you know, or again, remain top of mind more frequently. And they, oh yeah, that's, that's that site that I subscribe to and oh, here's some cool content I didn't know about. So it's just a great way. You don't have to, you know, create new content. You can just repurpose existing content and keep your subscribers happy by providing value.

Yeah, it's a great point. I think two points there, frequency and bringing up that content that subscribers or any reader might have missed. You know, with T Journey, we kind of have the same issue there where there's hundreds and hundreds of archive old long form articles. And these are articles that are thousands of words long and they're, you know, for a new subscriber, they don't even know it exists until you directly send them the newsletter and says, hey, here's an arc, you know, check out the, from the archive. And yeah, I mean frequency too, to your point. Ideally, even as a magazine publisher, if you could send it, if you could send a newsletter every day, which is unrealistic generally that would be great. But if you're sending a newsletter once a month, here's an opportunity to bump up that frequency. I believe Small Boats does this twice a month where they pull a couple of articles that are related together and come back from the archive. And you know, it's funny, I'll read a newsletter today and I'll miss things. So if they sent me the same, somebody sent me the same newsletter tomorrow, I'm sure I'd see something in there that I thought was new, you know what I mean? Yep.

And another good thing you can use this if you're a magazine publisher is to highlight your authors or contributors. So even doing like a small little intro and then maybe list, you know, kind of their three top articles from your archives specific to that author or contributor is a great way to bring, you know, categorize some content as well in your newsletter.

Yeah, I like that idea a lot. Yeah, someone who's maybe has a popular article and you want to, you want to showcase that article, plus maybe a couple others that they've written, especially if they have a topical expertise of some kind. Right, That's a great idea. So while we're on, on Small boats here, I, I think it's appropriate to show what their monthly newsletter looks like because it's, it's really excellent. So again, magazine publisher, you're going to. And we'll get to news publishers. You, you, you, let's say you publish in an issue a month, this issue. And I get a lot of them. I get a lot of magazine emails in my inbox. This is my favorite. And you know when you, when you open it, your heart rate drops when you open it. Of course, now they're in, you know, it's nature and boating and wooden boats and, and it's beautiful, beautiful stuff. But it's, it's simple. And you know, they have the COVID and note right below the COVID is a join request right away and then the intro from the editor, a join today button. Buttons work. Then here comes the content. We have a couple of featured articles with nice imagery buttons. And then we have the articles that come with the issue. And again at the bottom, subscribe to the issue. And then here come the sponsors again. Very, very, I think, elegant layout for a monthly issue based publisher. You know, some people say, well, you know, you have this big image. It's a, it's, you know, the image is above the fold. You don't really, you don't see what's below the fold. But that's not really the point here. The point is that this is the introduction of the issue. So anyone who is familiar with the way issues work, they know that there is additional content to be found. So scrolling is a natural and we are very trained to scroll and thumb our ways down on mobile for sure. Okay.

And another thing to point out too is most people are used to getting their email on their phones. And so this is going to be, you know, something that's on their phone. So again, you know, you're very used to scrolling and going down through an email.

So yeah, it works. Absolutely. Okay, so back to opportunities. We were talking about newsletter opportunities and let's switch a little bit over to if you're a news publisher. And one of the things that's becoming clear is breaking news is a valuable tool for you. If you are a local news publisher, regional publisher, and you cover breaking news, that could be the reason why someone would pay. That could absolutely be the tipping point for that. And you can handle that a couple of different ways. As far as the newsletter goes, you could send breaking news only to paid subscribers. It's easy to do. Basically you create a category, let's say in WordPress and you, you, you fire the breaking news category only to subscribers that have, you know, access to those, those articles. And you can, yeah, you can lock those articles down categorically or you can meter them sort of lightly. Restricting them. So lots of ways to handle that. But something to consider, you know, if, if, if I live in an area, I want breaking news, and you're going to make me pay for it. Yeah, you know, I think I'll probably get to the payment point faster than anything else. So consider breaking news another opportunity for converting paid subscriptions. Okay, so the second point of this podcast slash videocast is, you know, what should your newsletter look like? And we just looked at a magazine, but let me back up a little bit and say that the bottom line is you're sending the titles of your articles and the excerpt and an excerpt of your articles to your readership. And the idea, of course, is you want readers to click on the link in your newsletter and go back to your website and use up any free articles they have remaining, because that then triggers the prompt to subscribe. And you want that prompt to subscribe to happen over and over and over again. Another question that we get is, should we use. Should I use images in the newsletter? And there's some debate over whether to use images or not. Again, simplistically, if you're a magazine publisher, like Small Boats magazine. Yeah, absolutely. It's part of your brand. Beautiful images. If you're a news publisher, I would argue probably not. My favorite newsletters are ones that come in and I can scan very quickly and I don't get interrupted. Like Quartz does a good job with that, I think New York Times, maybe. Jeremy, you're. I know you get their email newsletter.

Yeah. So some articles are just the headlines with a little blurb and then they do sprinkle some images in there for some of their longer form content.

Yeah. And you know, images aren't a bad idea. Just don't want them to get in the way of the, of the news. The thing is, if you're, if you're strapped for time and effort, just skip the images. I'll show you a news publisher that I get. It's a local news publisher. It's called Daybreak. This is my Gmail account. And every day somewhere around 6.30am, this comes in and you know you have the one friendly image up top. This is Daybreak News. And they don't have anything yet at that URL, but Rob promised me that he'd put up at least a redirect so you could subscribe and take a look at the newsletter. And essentially there's no imagery. It's just titles and copy, and that's it. And I love this. And of course, this is about our local community It's a wonderful way to produce a newsletter. Heat covers. And this is something I think every local news publisher really has to do. You produce your own news, but there's a lot of news happening around you that's happening on social and listservs and forums, Facebook groups, college blogs. There's a lot out there. And what Daybreak is doing is they're taking what Rob thinks is the most important news and assembling it into one daily kind of summary of what's going on in the area. And Daybreak has blown up. I mean, it's a startup, just over a year old. They surpassed 10,000 subscribers in going. May have more subscribers now than our local regional news publisher. But I'd say think a little bit outside the box. It could be its own product. Back to creating products. But back to the point. I was trying to make this very, very simple approach of titles and excerpts absolutely does the job. I don't. I don't want any more. Personally, I don't need images in here. And the thing we'll talk about later, too, is you can automate this, which is totally cool. Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah. New subject line. So, Jeremy, you and I were talking. Tyler was talking to. Tyler was going to come here, but he got his booster shot, so he's feeling a little.

A little out of it.

But anyway. And you. You were talking about. I think maybe it was the New York Times and. And how they handle their subject lines.

Yeah, so there's, you know, the subject line is really important, especially if it's an email that goes out every day because you want to entice people to click on it. And so subject lines are very, very important. So a good way to do that is to just do kind of some highlights of what's in the newsletter so that you can draw people into it. You don't really want to try to be cute, but you also don't want to have the same exact subject line every single time. And so I think putting maybe a couple words at the beginning so people know what it is, and then some couple of keywords or key topics that are covered in that particular email is a good way to at least kind of get started with the subject line.

Yeah, subject lines are really important. You know, it's like the headline is the key. It's the grabber. You know, if I were to write a morning, like a. Like a morning brief for our little town of Grantham, New Hampshire, I'd probably title it, you know, Morning Brief as sort of the thing that Repeats so people know what it is when it comes in. And. And then like today I would have, you know, Grantham elections, soccer finals and bridge closing or something like that. Just like you said, you know what's coming in that newsletter. It's the teaser to keep reading. And you're right. I see a lot of newsletters that come in with the same headline all the time. And certainly we were guilty of doing that too. We're changing that now. So think about something that brands you right away and that you can, you can repeat. It's probably, maybe it's just the name of your publication. Maybe it's like a morning brief or something that, that becomes part of your brand. And then a little bit about what's in that newsletter to create the curiosity to actually get in there and start reading. Yeah, I have another note here. I don't understand what it's all about, so I'll skip to UTM codes. So let's talk a little bit about UTM codes. I know, Jeremy, you know more about it than I do, but I'll take a. Take a quick pass at it. Essentially what it is, UTM code is a, is a link to an article that has tracking information in it. And so essentially the way it works is if somebody clicks a link to your article to go to your website, Google Analytics tracks. Hey, this click came from this newsletter, this email newsletter. And so you can go to your Google Analytics, you can go to our insights and we track this in a neat way and see exactly how your newsletter is performing, how your articles are performing. And that's something that is really important to do. How do I do I get that right?

Yeah, yeah. And you can automate that if you use something like mailchimp. And you can also, in the show notes, I'll put a link to UTM generator that shows you how to add it to a link if you're using a different service that doesn't have the auto tracking enabled. But yeah, it's a great way just to know what links people are clicking on. For example, like having the subscribe button, if we go back to that archive email, small boats, knowing which one of these buttons is performing the best as far as the join goes. Right. So the one in the footer down there can have a different UTM code than the one up at the top. And so that way you start, maybe it was the other one that had multiple ones. If you have multiple join, then you can see which ones are performing the best. Like here, for example, you would be able to track and see, are people clicking the button or are they clicking the join today up in the actual text and know what's actually performing the best for you, so.

Yep, exactly.

Yep. Another good thing you can do on these as well is to put the UTM codes on the images as far as making the images clickable to the article. Right. So that way you can know if people are actually clicking on the image to get to the article or are they clicking on the text link below it. And so just getting more data around that and what people are actually clicking on can be helpful to. In building out and refining your newsletter over time.

Yeah, yeah. You know, especially with joining join or subscribe buttons, those are repeatable elements. You'll want to make sure that they're working as intended. And you'll have positioning, too. Right. You might have a button that sits at the top and nobody clicks it, but it's the button at the bottom that's actually doing the job. Find out things like that. Yep. All right, cool. So again, back to what should your newsletter look like? You have your title and excerpts. You may or may not have imagery. You're paying attention to your subject lines, getting your brand in there and teasing the content you're tracking with UTM codes. You have your call to subscribe at least twice in your email newsletter, as we just looked at. And then one other thing you want to do is make sure you have a subscribe link somewhere near the bottom. So oftentimes email newsletters are viral. So I might get one and I'll send it to a friend, say, oh, you got to read this article, and I'll send it to a friend. Well, that friend might not be a subscriber at all, but if you provide a link, usually somewhere near the bottom, then that subscriber that your friend can just click the link to say, hey, maybe I do want to subscribe to this. So I don't know if this is here or not, but should be. Okay, so that's what your newsletter should look like. And then let's talk about how to send your newsletter. We sort of tapped on it a little bit, really. There are two ways. One is you build your newsletter. You create a newsletter every day or every week, and you push it out yourself. Something like Constant Contact. You can do it in mailchimp. You can do it in Campaign Monitor. You can do it really, in any email provider. Or the second way is to automate it through something called RSS to Email. So mailchimp does this really well. And the way that works, if you're strapped for time and you just, you just want to set it and forget it and have something go out. Then RSS to email is your ticket. Generally speaking, I would say if you're a magazine and you're going to be concerned about your brand and imagery, you're probably going to push those newsletters out manually so that each one looks good and has what it needs to be. If you're a news publisher, I think that's your best use case for RSS to email because now you can set a format that's really simple, titles and excerpts and get it out. And so what is RSS 2 email, actually? So the way it automates is like with Mailchimp, Mailchimp actually scans your website every day and looks for new articles on the site. And if it sees new articles through rss, it actually pulls the text, it pulls the images into a template that you create in mailchimp and that you schedule to send. You might say, if you're daily, you might say, okay, send this at 6am or 7am every day or once a week or whatever your schedule is. And then before that newsletter gets sent, mailchimp actually scans your site for the content and will sort of suck it in magically. And then on that scheduled time and day, boom, it just goes out. It's really, it's amazing for, for the right application. It just saves you a ton, a ton of work. And you can, you know, you can update the template. There's nothing that says you can't update the template. So, like, if your sponsor on your email newsletter changes, you just hop into mailchimp and, you know, swap out the sponsor logo or image or whatever it is before the, the campaign gets sent. So you can always tweak your automated newsletter as well. Okay, so I think that pretty much covers the newsletter. Just to recap a little bit, this is your number two, at least very high source of subscription revenue. If you're not, if you haven't looked at your newsletter in a while, it's time to definitely take a look and see what you can do to improve it. Make sure it get, goes out regularly. Send it out to your entire list. You have, you have free registrations, you have paid subscribers. At the very least, make sure, make sure everyone gets it. You might be sending newsletters categorically, you know, like, like breaking news, like sports or business, whether someone's free or paid, and they're, if they opt into business, send all your business to everybody free or paid because the free, that'll motivate the free and of course the paid. Get what they want. Add a sponsor to your newsletter. If you don't, if you're just starting out and you don't have a sponsor, make one up. Pick a friend that has a business put create a sponsorship area so you can show it to other potential sponsors and then pick a price and go down the road. If you're super timestrapped and you're a news publisher, I'd say you're a great candidate for RSS to email full email automation. Mailchimp's great. And if you have, and I forgot to mention this early on, if you have a question for us about newsletters or subscriptions or really anything having to do with digital subscriptions, we'd love to hear your questions. You know, send, send, send your question off to infoine101.com and we'll answer it because that's what we like to do.

Yeah, and I did want to touch a little bit on some of the possibilities with Leaky Paywall, specifically with your email newsletter. And so with our mailchimp integration, just a couple things you can do is you can set specific tags per level. And so when someone signs up for a level, you can tag them with a specific thing and then you can use that tag to segment them out for these newsletters we've been talking about. So if you're wondering, okay, well, how do I create a paid only newsletter? Great way to do that is just to tag them with the level name that they subscribe to. And then in mailchimp, you can create a specific email campaign that's segmented by those tags. And then that's a great way to send out emails to only paid. And you can do the same for free. Right. So if you want to send an email only to your free subscribers, just tag them with the word free or something like that within the wiki paywall level. When they sign up, it'll automatically tag them inside of mailchimp, and you can use that to segment them out. Another thing you can do is you can attach them to a different list if you want to change, if you want to segment users that way. And you can also set it for some reason, if someone signs up for a specific level and you don't want them added to mailchimp, you can do that on a level by level basis as well. And then we have a function inside of Leaky Paywall where if someone cancels or their payment fails and they're no longer a paying subscriber, that we can actually unsubscribe them automatically from your mailchimp list. And so that way if you have a paid only newsletter you don't have to worry about having to manually go in there and set people who are no longer paid. You don't have to manually change them inside of mailchimp at all. Leaky Paywall and our mailchimp integration will handle that for you automatically.

Yeah, that's amazing Jeremy. We should do a session on targeting just in general. We could dive in with not only with mailchimp a little deeper but with on site targeting as well. Yeah. Yep, good stuff. I think that's it for me. Anything else you want to cover?

That's all I got.

All right. Hey, thanks for listening and maybe watching so we'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. You can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe and your podcast player of choice and we'll see you next episode.