How Mexico News Daily Streamlines Newsletters with flowletter for a Better Reader Experience

I put. I pulled this chart today from Mexico. And their free registrations are accelerating.

Yeah.

Which is impressive. And it all makes sense. We look at the big publishers, too. The New York Times. If you look at the last 11, 12 years of the New York Times and their. And their metered paywall setup, you'll see that the last five or six have actually accelerated as far as new paid subscribers.

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com and now for today's episode.

All right, welcome to the Paywall podcast. Today we're going to talk about our new Flow Letter service. It's a little self serving and I do apologize for that upfront, but we've had some incredible experience. Experiences with it or publishers have had incredible experiences with it and it's doing a lot of good. And we'd like to break down with looking at Mexico News Daily and their use case for Flowletter and how it's saved them time and made them money and really made the connection between them and their reader that much stronger. After getting that out of the way, if you're struggling or you're not really happy with your current email newsletter provider, let's absolutely talk. Okay, so this is gonna be a little bit interview style. Tyler, I know you. Tyler's the product manager here and he is the brains behind Flow Letter and went through from day one with Mexico News Daily migrating from their old newsletter system to Flow Letter. All right, Tyler, first question. Take me back. How long ago was it and what were they using? Can you paint a picture for where Mexico News Daily started?

Yeah, so they're. They were using mailchimp, I believe, as their newsletter sending service. And I just want to back up and explain why Flowletter came to be. So anyone who runs the publication will know that when you turn on the free registration that we preach on every single episode that you need to do, if you haven't done it, please do it. Your newsletter list will start to expand quite quickly. You'll find that you'll start racking up additional fees with your newsletter provider. And so Flow Letter was built out of necessity to combat this punitive approach that many newsletter services have when you continue to add and add to your list. So that was the impetus behind Flow Letters creation. Mexico News Daily, again, they were using mailchimp and as most publishers do, they're building everything in mailchimp. They're having to go back and forward in that process. And so Flow Letter takes away that necessity and you can build things directly in WordPress, your newsletter, send it, manage it, everything in one, one place.

So how long ago was this when they switched to Flow Letter?

I would say it's been about six months. Has it been that long?

About six months, yeah. That's fair enough.

Yeah. Okay.

And just a little background on Mexico News Daily. They're the largest English language Mexican news publisher out there, so they're pretty good size. I guess regional news publisher might be a good way to classify them in the publishing world. And they're focused on news and news in the regions now, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And just to clarify, Tyler, when you say they're going back and forth between Mailchimp, that's essentially writing the content for the website in WordPress and then copying that content into Mailchimp, right?

That's right. Not only having to copy, but also having to upload the photos, embedding whatever you need to embed over in mailchimp, and scheduling inside of mailchimp and trying to navigate to different ecosystems.

And so with flowletter, how does it work for them now they, let's say they post an article in WordPress. What's the next step to get it to send?

Yeah, so Flow Letter works similarly to how you publish an article. It's a post type now and it's a newsletter post type. So inside of WordPress, you click on your newsletter tab for Flow Letter and you can go in and create your newsletter inside of your WordPress dashboard. And you're able to call upon all of your post content that's already there. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see that there's a story that says two way trade between Mexico and US reaches record high. You could search for that inside of your newsletter builder, inside of WordPress and pull this story into your newsletter within a few seconds, versus if you're using mailchimp or any other provider, you would have to download the featured image, you'd have to copy and paste the excerpt, you'd have to copy the headline, you'd have to copy all of this stuff and move it into that system. Whereas flow letter is WordPress first. And because of that, you get the benefit of having all of your content in one place. And you're able to build out your newsletter super fast by, by calling up on the Existing data that's there.

So you're just, you're literally checking off the articles that already exist and assembling your newsletter.

Think of it as like a drag and drop. I want this article. I want this article. I want this article. Okay. It's done, it's built. And then if you want to fluff up the excerpt, you want to change the headline, you want to. Maybe you don't like the featured image, you can adjust it on the fly inside a flow letter and, and just go.

Yep, yep, that's. Which is. So that's a workflow saver. Right. Big time. Any idea of how much time they've saved? Instead of double copying, pasting, going into Mailchimp, assembling in Mailchimp, uploading in Mailchimp, and then just doing it in WordPress where the. You've already built the article and you just send it. And for. And let's not talk about automation. We'll talk about that later. Yeah, just the manual process of doing it in WordPress versus doing it in Mailchimp. Any ideas?

I would, I would argue that you could save at least an hour per newsletter that you're sending. Okay. Roughly. Because if you think about it, if you're publishing, in their case, you've got six, seven, eight stories that go out per day. If you're having to upload that copy, paste that, reorganize that newsletter every single time a mailchimp, it could take a while to do that, whereas in this system it could take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

Yeah, that's amazing. If, if you're listening to this and you're curious and you made it this far and you want to actually just play around with the interface, just ping us, just reach out. No, no charge, no commitment. We're happy to actually drop in the newsletter builder into your site and you can play around with it and if you like it, we can talk more.

Yeah. And this is all very publisher focused. We built this with the publisher in mind as all of our products are aimed at all the features and all the fun stuff is aimed at what publishers need to do or need to achieve.

Yeah. I will say that what we've heard, what I've heard. One of the things I've heard from publishers I've talked to is that some of these email newsletter platforms have just gotten too bloated. Somebody actually told me that if so and so adds another feature. Every time so and so adds another feature, it's worse.

Yeah.

And this platform is not for everybody. This is platform is based on the what we think are the real pain points for publishers, speed of work and then ease of access for the. For your readers so that you can get on with creating your content and focusing on your business. Whereas I do talk to publishers that are interested in having a lot of complex data, a lot of different, you know, sophisticated workflows like drip campaigns and things like that. That's not really. That's not what Flow Letter is. Flow Letter is at this point in time, what we're trying to do is fundamentally solve the time issue on the actual sending part so you don't have to waste your time on that. And also the connection issue, which is then brings me to my next pain point is subscribers accessing your articles, not having to log in. Do you want to. Do you want to address that with what was happening with let's say mailchimp on that side versus how flowletter works now?

Yeah. So for any publisher using, whether it's Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, any of the other systems, you know that when you send out your newsletter and someone clicks on a link from their Gmail, let's say, and they land on the article that you provided, depending on where the meter is, they might not be able to read that article, even though they might be a subscriber. They just maybe they're not logged in. It opened a different browser. There's a number of reasons why someone might not be able to see something that they've paid for. And so obviously a big pain point. You don't want your premium paid customers. The fuss with having to log in or reset passwords, it's a big hurdle with a paywall. It's probably the number one thing that, that I see that publishers struggle with for their users. It's logging in. So taking that into account with Flow Letter, what we've done is whenever you fire your newsletter through Blow Letter and someone clicks on the link, we're checking to see whether that email address is premium or not. And we're just giving them access to their content. We're logging them in. They're getting to see what they paid for. No fuss. Doesn't matter if it opens in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, some Facebook browser. Doesn't matter. It lets them in, they can see content.

Yeah. I even hear it on my end repeatedly. So and so is having trouble logging in. So and so had enough trouble logging in that they canceled their subscription. It's not a huge percentage, but that's churn that you can be completely avoided.

Yeah, essentially.

Yeah.

And I Think of it as that it's a churn mitigation service in a way to. To just get people access. And also if. If they get logged in and they have expired, then they're gonna. They're gonna get that messaging to. To re up. If they're free, they're gonna get messaging to upgrade like this feature along. Whether or not you save time on building the newsletter or not, or this feature alone is worth taking a look at this service.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Absolute churn reduction. People are paying for access to your content, and the fact that they can click a newsletter link and never have to log in, they can always read the article, is just a better experience for your best readers. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Was a little bit of a plug again.

Oh, yeah, we're plugging the whole podcast. Shameless. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah.

Okay, so the next thing I want to talk to you about is we've covered, okay. You get to publishers or readers get to automatically log in without any fuss. You as a publisher get to crank out your newsletters faster because you're in WordPress already and your images are already loaded up and you're just assembling your existing articles in the newsletter. But let's talk about speeding up that workflow and also serving your reader better when it comes to automation. So one of the things. Now, just correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Mexico came to us and said, hey, we want to target regions in Mexico and let our readers opt in and opt out of different regions. And I just went and took a quick look on their website. Which is it here?

I don't know if it's. Yeah, it's under subscribe.

Yeah, under subscribe. So I'll just click down subscribe button. And so we have a nice, clean, simple subscribe page. I'm going to hit monthly. And down here we have some regions, right? Yucatan, Mexico City, Southwest Bajio, North Central Pacific, et cetera, et cetera. And as a subscriber, you can. And you can do this, I think, for free and paid, right? Subscribers or you can decide how you want to do it. Yeah, but so now this is. This does two things. One, so with Flow Letter, we added this in order to add people to the right segments or regions. This can be done for. For category topics. Right. If you want people to opt into your local news publication for sports or for politics or for business, you can apply it that way as well. And so folks are automatically assigned to segments, and then they can go to their My account page, I believe had opt into more or opt out of something. But the other, other thing that that flow letter does for them, which I think is pretty cool, is that these regional newsletters that go out, let's say I signed up for Southwest. These are fully automated newsletters, right?

That's right.

And how does that work? Tell me how they don't have to lift a finger to send out a newsletter about the Southwest region.

Yeah. So when people sign up or a paid plan, they have the option here to as you said, pick a region or multiple regions or none at all, it doesn't matter. It's up to the user. And they're getting, basically getting tagged with this data inflow letter. And so that allows us to segment who these people are, what they want to see. And what we do is we build out categorical based newsletters that run once a week based on the content that's in that category for that week of time.

But let me just stop you for a second.

A lot of sentences there.

Yeah. So this is all driven by WordPress categories.

That's right. So we're not using RSS feeds, we're not using anything like that. We're leaning on the WordPress ecosystem, the data that's within and we're creating automatic newsletters that go out to these specific segments on, in their case, I think it's every Sunday at 8am and we send out, there's eight, nine different newsletters that go out at the same time to the people that want it. And so if you're super interested in Mexico City, you're going to see Mexico City News. If you're super interested in the golf, you're gonna see the golf news. So that's, that was their reasoning behind it. And a lot of people are signing up for it. They want that personalized newsletter. They don't. They still want the general newsletter that Mexico sends out for their paid people, but they also want a personalized I'm only interested in this region.

Yeah. Makes total sense. Yeah. And the, yeah.

And the engagement is much higher as you might imagine for people who sign up on this, they open it, the open rates are off the charts. The click through rates are off the charts. You're showing them what they want to see, right?

Yeah. That's fantastic. Can you just paint a picture of how frequently the, and what the schedule is for? The newsletter sends roughly once a week. The whole, their whole approach. Let's, let's back up a little bit because we never broke down like how many newsletters they actually send.

Yeah, yeah. I believe they are sending three newsletters per day. I believe. I think so they've got one that goes to their free list. So their free registration and they've got one that goes to their paid. And then I think they have an afternoon or evening newsletter that goes out to their paid as well. Similar to. We talk about Salem Reporter. It's a similar approach to that. So they've got sort of three general newsletters that are going out that they're building out themselves. Um, and then you have this preference based, regional based newsletters that go out once a week. And that's eight, nine different newsletters that go out automatically. They don't touch it. It's done for them.

Right? Yeah. Just a couple of editorial notes. So the free, the nice thing about breaking out your free newsletter with a separate email is you, is you can lean into the upgrade messaging in your free to free registered readers. And that's really is the purpose of your free newsletter is to, is to convert paid subscriptions. So that's great. And then your premium newsletter, you do have the opportunity to treat your paid subscribers a little differently in your premium newsletter. That afternoon edition could also be set up as a premium only benefit as Salem does. So there's just a couple of ideas for you.

Yeah. And the beauty of this is that at any point in time your paid subscriber can go into their My account page or click the link at the bottom of their newsletter and update the preferences. They're like, oh wow, I love Southwest, but I just traveled to the Baja region and I want some of that news. So now you can update your preferences in real time. The next newsletter that goes out on Sunday, you'll get it. And so that's all part of the flow letter ecosystem. Again, we're, we've built this for the publisher.

Yeah. So that's awesome. So folks can opt in and opt out of their categorical preferences.

And they stay on those main lists. Right? They stay on whether in this case they're still on the paid list even though they didn't select any of these preferences. You're not going to unsubscribe them from the whole system if they opt out?

Yes. That's. Some email providers tend to do okay. And so to take it one step further, how does a paid subscription, let's say somebody cancels or their credit card fails, does that get accounted for?

Yeah. So we're also, we're keeping track of their stripe status. So if someone pays, we're tagging them as paid. If somebody fails in stripe, we're tagging them as failed. If somebody cancels, we're tagging them as canceled. If they happen to renew it, back to paid. And so that's how Mexico is able to target essentially in real time their list. So they're always going to be targeting their paid, they're always going to be targeting their free. Based on that real time status updates into their, into their list.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So if somebody signs up and then they get canceled out for whatever reason, they're back to the free list which has the upgrade messaging in it.

That's right. That's great.

Okay, so let's wrap this up. So for Mexico, we're looking at essentially much faster workflow in WordPress. The ability for paid subscribers to bypass leaky paywall and get straight to the content, have a better experience, have a completely automated regional opt in and opt out system that's driven by WordPress categories. So they can just publish their articles into a category and they know automatically those newsletters get sent. What I want to talk about next.

Is.

What'S the impact for Mexico? And I'm just going to pull over this little chart here that I've, I've grayed out all the critical data on here but I just want to show you what happened. What has happened. And I put, I pulled this chart today for Mexico and the red line here, this is all the last three months of data. The red line here is free registrations. The blue line is paid subscriptions. I want to say that your, the conversion rate between free registered readers and paid subscribers is I know we quote about 5 to 10%. It's quite a bit higher than that. That's all I'm going to say. But look at the trend of this, especially this pre registration line. I take my arrow here and I draw a trend line that is impressive growth. And this is a, I will say that this is a publisher that came in with a pretty good size email list already and yet their free registrations are accelerating.

Yeah.

Which is impressive. And it all makes sense. We look at the big publishers too. The New York Times. If you look at the last 1112 years of the New York Times and their, and their metered paywall setup, you'll see that the last five or six have actually accelerated. As far as new paid subscribers, it's flat growth for a while and then talk about nurturing over time it's been accelerating.

Yeah. It's a critical part of the paid process.

Yeah.

I always tell publishers that there's a direct correlation between the number of free signups and the number of paid. There's a percentage that you can rely on for the most part in it virtually, I would say, I would argue that it's virtually the same in almost every market. There's going to be a conversion rate that's pretty steady across, at least in the local news market that you can rely on if you're doing a free registration approach, a nurturing approach like that.

Yeah. There we have a, we have a blog post. It's actually a podcast we did last year or a couple of years ago. And there was some data revealed about the percentage subscription of subscriptions per metro area. So they, the data was pulled from some large and medium sized metro areas in terms of how many print and digital subscribers relation. And, and, and we extrapolated the data and looked at how that compared against the population, the general population of the region. And we were finding numbers in the 5 to 10% range as far as number of paid subscribers versus population. And some were lower and a few were a little higher than that. But looking at their subscription systems, and this was again a year or two ago, the setup wasn't really great. Like they weren't doing the free registration. They were, they were leaning out the old school direct sales approach for reaching out and selling subscriptions.

Yeah.

So if you're not, if you're not achieving a 5 to 10% ratio between your free registered readers and your paid subscribers, then reach out, talk to us because this, you should. Absolutely. Especially if you're in local news. You should be running that quite easily.

Yeah, local news, they tend to be a bit higher than the average, I would say, partly because they're the only game in town for the content that they provide. So they, they most certainly should be higher than 10% if they're selling subscriptions.

Yep. Okay, so last thing, Tyler, what's next for Flowletter? What are you working on?

Yeah, something we've been putting together as of late is the ability to Send SMS and WhatsApp messages to your audience. We're still in the beta process, maybe the alpha process of this, but essentially you'll be able to collect phone numbers in the checkout process and leaky and then you'll be able to target messages to people that want news Updates, perhaps via WhatsApp or via SMS.

That's fantastic. So it's one more step in, in terms of resting control over your destiny as a publisher. So you, when you grab an email address, which is the free registration is all about. And you send your newsletters frequently, which is another topic. You're basically taking control of your own traffic. You don't have to lean on SEO or social as much anymore. And with the next step of reaching people Via SMS or WhatsApp, it's the next natural step to controlling your future. I heard a publisher speak last night, actually I went to attend a session and I could tell that this publisher was lost in social media a little bit because there's a lot of TikTok and there's a lot of talk about being really present on these platforms. But of course these platforms always change. And so you put a lot of effort into a platform, whether it's appealing to Google or appealing to Facebook or appealing to TikTok and then they make changes and also in your content disappears on you. But when you have an email address, when you have a phone number and you are sending your news, your newsletter is structured correctly and you're sending it frequently. What we see, and Mexico's a good example of that, is we see traffic to a site mushroom, we see email lists mushroom and we see paid subscriptions also mushroom. It's, you can do it all and that pleases your advertisers. You're, you can have, you can set up ad free plans. If you're heavy into advertising for paid subscribers, that will motivate a push. And yet your advertising exposure goes up because your overall traffic has increased so much. I know it's a little counterintuitive on that one, but that's the reality.

Yeah. Try not to focus on the social stuff so much. I like to think of it as like polishing a used car or like a rental car.

It's. They're going to take it back.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, but why on earth am I doing all this effort to then take the car back? This doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, you, you should be present, but you shouldn't be. That shouldn't be your total focus. Your focus should be on collecting email addresses and phone numbers as a way to fortify your operation against Google, against social, against all these platforms so that you can control your own destiny, your own whenever you want traffic to your site, you can make that happen. And we've got so many publishers running Flow Letter that basically can turn on a spigot for traffic. When they send their newsletters to 70,000 people, boom. Traffic just goes off the charts right away. And so they're getting to dictate when and how and their traffic flows to their site unintended Email is the constant.

It's been the constant since the beginning of the Internet. Yeah, Tyler, I'm going to quote you, that was fabulous. Social media is like polishing a rental car. And let's end on that. Thanks for listening. Please reach out if you have questions.

See ya.

So if you want our help in actually developing benefits, copy for all your touch points and have us install it across your website. Just get in touch and let's, let's talk about how to do that. It'll help convert subscriptions.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription Strategy, go to LeakyPaywall.com see you next time.