How publishers reengage dormant email subscribers

Increasing email subscriber lists make newsletters more appealing to advertisers, but having a list made up of dead leads drops the value of that list, dragging down open rates and click-through rates substantially. 

Beyond amassing big numbers, publishers are increasingly focused on quality in their email lists. That means taking on the unenviable, some say nearly hopeless, task of reengaging subscribers who have gone dark, which can look like automated follow-ups at the 30- to 60-day mark or cutting your losses and removing disengaged readers altogether.

Newsletter publisher Morning Brew has a quick-triggered filtering process of dealing with disengaged readers. Tyler Denk, senior product lead, said that the company currently has 1.6 million active subscribers for its daily newsletter, but it’s constantly churning subscribers who have lowered their engagement level and over the course of its lifetime, it’s had over 3 million. 

If at any given point since signing up a reader hasn’t opened the newsletter for 60 days, Denk said a reengagement email will go out and if they don’t respond within 48 hours, the name is removed from the list. But for those who sign up and don’t open the first email within three weeks, the same 48-hour reengagement process begins, with slightly different messaging.

“We have pretty strict churning process, so if you show levels of you not engaging with the newsletter, we don’t care about the vanity metric of total subscribers. We really care about the total opens,” said Denk. “If we acquire you as a subscriber and you stop reading, we don’t really care to keep you on our list for the sake of saying we have more subscribers. We keep open rates high, which makes deliverability better, which increases the total unique opens, which is the only metric that really matters.”

Axios also starts its reengagement process as early as one-week post-sign-up, where inactive users are prompted with a multiple-choice question as to why they haven’t opened the newsletter yet. The company also started doing a second-week churn process, which asks subscribers who haven’t engaged in two weeks since sign-up if they want to stay subscribed and removes those who don’t answer. Axios said it has seen success with running early reengagement campaigns, even maintaining an average open rate of 43% from before running this strategy to after.

Publishers who rely on newsletter advertising, like business-to-business newsletter publisher SmartBrief, which runs 275 newsletters, see the strategy as necessary.

“The majority of our revenue comes from ads in newsletters, so reengagement is worth it for us,” said Joe Webster, vp of marketing and audience development at SmartBrief. However, the bulk of the company’s reengagement strategy is focused on the top 50 revenue performing newsletters, which he said has the more valuable subscribers.

Webster said that their reengagement strategy is set up like an automated drip campaign and once someone hits the 30-day mark of not opening emails, the follow-up begins. From a resource standpoint, the hardest part is creating the campaign, but once it’s built, it’s easy to maintain and monitor and has helped SmartBrief reduce churn, assisting the company financially.

Another exec at a digital media company, which has been using an automated reengagement strategy for the past few years, said that “generally, it’s difficult to get [disengaged subscribers] to be your most engaged users.” Therefore, the company’s reengagement strategy is focused more on meeting advertising goals than editorial goals, meaning its more valuable to keep list lengths long and open rates high to appeal to advertising partners versus trying to get the reengaged cohort to view the brands’ content.

This year, The Wall Street Journal invested in its email reengagement strategy, which membership product lead Annemarie Dooling was tasked with spearheading. Inheriting 50 newsletter lists, some several years old that had never been cleaned before, Dooling said her entire efforts last quarter were dedicated to the newspaper’s email reengagement strategy and in her opinion, it was not worth the outcome. 

Dooling said that less than 1% of subscribers that went through a reengagement campaign actually started engaging again. “It’s a small amount, less than 1,000 for a huge list,” which could be as large as 500,000.

Dan Oshinsky, a consultant at Inbox Collective and former director of newsletters for BuzzFeed and The New Yorker, said that the reason reengagement is a struggle for a lot of companies is because they’ve never done something like this before, and only a handful of clients had some sort of engagement strategy already in place before working with him. 

“They’ve been collecting addresses for years and years, most of whom they’ve not talked to for years and years, so trying to win them back after five years, that’s tough,” Oshinsky said.  

But for clients that establish automated programs that target readers at the moment in the relationship when they have a good shot to win them back — typically around the 30-day mark — Oshinsky said reengagement works really well. And publishers that have these reengagement strategies in place typically saw open rates that were two to three times higher than the industry average, he said. 

Aside from the front-end lift to clean up the lists and create the automated reengagement campaign, Oshinsky said that it’s substantially cheaper to chase after disengaged subscribers than it is to find new ones. Where the cost per email acquisition might range between $.25 and $3, he said reengaging a single subscriber is essentially free since many email marketing services have reengagement services built-in. 

Making the decision to let the subscriber go is another challenge, but Webster said, “If they’ve shown value historically, trying to keep them in your audience makes a lot of sense. If they came in because of an offer and they haven’t engaged with you since then, then probably not.”

The post How publishers reengage dormant email subscribers appeared first on Digiday.

Safari’s new private browsing mode provides a new path around publisher paywalls

Publishers have discovered a new, Apple-shaped hole in their metered paywalls.

The most recent version of Apple’s Safari browser, which began rolling out to users in late September, prevents sites from detecting when Safari visitors have the browser’s private browsing mode enabled. Private browsing, like incognito mode, temporarily prevents publishers from reading or writing cookies to a phone or computer, which makes it impossible for a paywall to detect how much content a reader has consumed, thereby rendering the meter useless.

The change also evades the countermeasures many news publishers deployed in an attempt to stop visitors using incognito mode. For example, an internet user who tries to read a story on The Boston Globe’s website using Chrome’s incognito mode will be blocked by a window demanding that visitors register or turn the mode off.

But a visitor using the most recent version of Safari in private browsing mode doesn’t get that same message and can read a limitless amount of content on the Globe’s site, simply by opening stories in new private tabs each time.

Far fewer Americans browse the internet using Safari than Google’s Chrome browser. Safari claims 9% of the U.S. desktop browser market share, according to Statcounter. (The picture is different on mobile devices: Safari claimed 53% of mobile browser market share in the U.S. in September, also according to Statcounter; Chrome accounted for 40% that same month).

But Safari users, who are overwhelmingly Apple device owners, are disproportionately valuable because they tend to be more affluent, and they tend to pay for news; Apple users tend to over-index as news subscribers, said Pete Doucette, managing director in the telecoms, media and technology practice at FTI Consulting, and for many news publishers, they tend to represent a majority of subscribers.

The change is recent enough that few publishers have determined the change is negatively affecting their businesses. An executive at one news publisher that operates a metered paywall noted that subscription sales driven by users in private mode was “slightly softer” this weekend, but the overall numbers were too low to form any conclusions.

More broadly, Safari’s update adds one more thing to a long to-do list for subscription-focused publishers, who already have a tough time figuring out how to convince readers to pay for subscriptions. “This will lead to a hard paywall for all readers and also make it more difficult to monetize content,” said Danielle Coffey, svp of strategic initiatives at the News Media Alliance. “While we’re interested in protecting our readers’ privacy, we still need a return on our investments to sustain quality journalism.”

Browser changes have been giving publishers headaches all year, on both the advertising and subscription fronts. In late July, a change Google made to Chrome forced publishers to find a new way to detect whether people were browsing the site in incognito mode, despite months of complaints and protests publishers made with Google. Anti-tracking changes made by Firefox have dropped the value of publisher ad inventory viewed in those browsers by more than 15% in countries such as Germany.

In response, publishers have become newly focused on cutting down the number of anonymous readers they have, turning to registration walls, among other things.

Those efforts may need to be accelerated, because observers expect that Safari will not be the last browser to make this kind of move, with web browsers continuing to focus on privacy to stay in the good graces of consumers and regulators.

“I would expect to see something like this come from Firefox and Opera soon,” said Dael Jackson, director of engagement products at Naviga, a paywall vendor. “Privacy is becoming a big focus for browsers, and they’re definitely going to be persistent in maintaining that privacy.”

The post Safari’s new private browsing mode provides a new path around publisher paywalls appeared first on Digiday.

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The best brands operate their businesses as people. They don’t do a huge deal with a partner and never talk to them again. They build a relationship over time which can expand their network and lead to more opportunities. So many old school industries are still operating in the same fashion they did over 20 years ago, even though the technology we have now is completely different. Stop doing cold calling because that’s what used to work and go join a facebook group around your town or something you have a common interest in… You will be surprised how well it goes.

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