Beyond The Newsletter Boom: Robust Strategies For Genuine Engagement

6:00PM Aug 25, 2023

Speakers:

Keywords:

newsletter

audience

readers

newsroom

template

reuters

launched

writing

writer

thought

talk

relaunch

news

product

people

blurbs

give

team

barbie

feedback

Do you have like, should I look at them? I didn't even like your mind. Maybe Maybe I'd like dings No. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I mean, and then I have a watch and I'm like it's all very well, you don't

have to worry about that.

You just need Yeah. She just kind of for me oh yeah, that's cool. Looks good

I got it. I can technically they make you like, work like, use their tool and print a label but

I like them. A lot. They're really trying to break into the whole map. Mapping and like, all their things are like, here's how you can like use it for election data. And I feel like everywhere I've worked, they all use data. So it's like, trying to like move into this

space this

and they were very aggressively reading me.

I also don't like nothing like watercolor Waterloo Yes.

Honestly, this

was so cute that I finished her name yesterday

that I was like long as

the other says in this sort of partitions so bits is useful Yeah. Can I use some other

sensitivity

of fear

Oh, doors Yeah, be welcoming people we don't really except one person in this audience and we're like

I was so confused earlier. I wanted to go to the

permutations. You want to understand that

why would why would you? Yeah, I went to five and six before and I was like, wait, they have tables like circles. But that's not what I'm prepared for.

But I do appreciate the pillar that's in the middle.

Okay, and when we have questions, this one's not being recorded so people can just shout to questions because the recorded ones they have to talk to Tommy What am I doing after a while I think so. Speak loudly enough. That's fine. But we can also also volunteer firmly there's like somebody with a different name, but he looked more like the tick didn't look like a very

I feel like

oh, well look, I think yeah, I should especially

look at that if you just open it with your finger who

should have seen me most most of my colleagues

Oh, yeah, I know. What do you want to take? We have a selfie before I'm bad at taking maybe that you guys should take some time giving what suppose the person do I present here? I can't I don't maybe button.

Selfie clearly we're family

is actually what we're doing. This is all it is watching us trying to take care

how many newsletter people does it take?

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photographer and I've actually had photographers after years high

standard recall this situation?

Um, yeah, I mean, we've the doors were closed. So you think people are realizing they can come in? So we were wondering if maybe, could you help us if there are questions? Like, okay, thank

you. I mean, I don't know. If we if you want to shut it. When do you think we should shut

the doors? Like 10 minutes after restart?

I mean, I don't really care because people can still open the doors.

Yeah, but then this is kind of small. No, but they could come in if they want to, but maybe we need the doors literally lows just to make sure it's not too noisy.

And then q&a wise, we're planning about like 20 minutes before the end of the session. Open up the q&a. Okay, so nevermind.

Yeah, and I can also let them know someone

Oh, wait, let me share this. I don't want to not taking over here.

Question is how interesting is that? Ready?

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Good afternoon. Welcome to our session on beyond the newsletter. Boom. Can you hear me all right. It's like difficult for me to hear that. So welcome to our session beyond the newsletter boom. Robust strategies for genuine engagement. I am so excited to be here today and be joined by my brilliant panelists that I'm going to introduce in just a minute. My name is Kim Bode, I am the audience product strategy lead at news pack by automatic news pack is an operating system for independent publishers built on WordPress. If you want to know more about it, come find me after and I'm also a newsletter consultant. So I've worked with organizations around the world big and small on figuring out their newsletter strategy and sometimes implementing some improvements. I like to think about how to help publishers drive engagement and growth and really develop genuine relationships with their readers and ultimately get them ideally to convert to become paying subscribers, members, donors, whatever it is you know, essentially like to activate the readers to contribute to the sustainability of the organization. And newsletters are obviously an important part of that, which I think probably most of you know, and that's why we're here today and we're going to be talking about that. I will go for this session is for you to have actionable takeaways. We're gonna go over some concrete examples on how you can use newsletters to you know, activate these readers. And also, not just, you know, I think at this point, we've had so many conference sessions on newsletters, you know, newsletters have been around for a few years. And we've talked quite a bit about newsletters, but we really want to take it a few steps further and think about what can you do when you already have an established newsletter program and with that, you know, that means you have at least one newsletter and maybe some depending on the size of your organization. So what do you do when you already have this established newsletter program and you want to make some improvements? to it? How can you be strategic about it? How can you, you know, improve your templates, improve your workflows, improve the editorial output and ideally also the business outcome and be the

best panel ever. That's what our little WhatsApp was.

Yeah, our panelists have plenty of experience in all of these different areas. So we're going to talk about that. Firstly, I'm going to briefly introduce them. On the you're very right, my left we have Nigel Parker who is the newsletter coach for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where she manages newsletters and assists with social media and digital production. Nyjah contributes also cultural and entertainment articles to unapologetically ATL, which is the newsrooms newsletter on black culture and Atlanta. And she has written for natural national publications including Ebony Magazine, jet magazine and HuffPost. Last year, Naja already had a presentation on newsletters, which really left quite an impression with me personally and I know also with Atlantic she was also there. So we're really excited. to have you here again today and share your wisdom with us. Then next to her we have Alana we're just already mentioned. She is the Director of newsletter strategy at the Washington Post where she oversees the newsletter strategy team, and works with newsletter writers and editors. Across the newsroom to ensure that the post newsletter portfolio is fresh, experimental and forward looking. Before that Ilana was the head of newsletters at political and she's also previously held senior roles at CNN BUSINESS stat and the Wall Street Journal. She has also been an adjunct professor at NYU and CUNY, and she's on the board of the online news Association and currently up for reelection, so you know what you gotta do? Go vote if you're a member. And then lastly, to my left, is unit Landowski. She's a newsletter editor on the digital team at Reuters, where she oversees the editorial strategy and operations for writers growing newsletter portfolio. Unit has coalesced the launch and relaunch of not less than seven newsletters since she joined writer writers. And she previously was the editor. For newsletters strategy and development at their target speaker, which is Berlin's biggest daily newspaper in the newspaper I grew up reading unit also teaches workshops on newsletters, journalism schools and conferences. Okay, welcome. Welcome. Happy to have you all here. So yeah, so as I already mentioned, newsletters have been a major talking point in the industry for some time. At this point, I think most organizations have realized the importance that newsletters have for engaging readers. For you know, driving them down the funnel, and generating revenue one way or another, whether that's real revenue driving them towards generating real revenue or maybe ad revenue depending on whether that is part of your business strategy. But yeah, so now that we're at this point where many organizations already have established newsletter programs, like our panelists, organizations, we want to talk about you know, what are how can you level up your newsletter, portfolio and there can be different reasons for that. So we're gonna go and walk through each individual ones of you and you can share a little bit on kind of like, what the situation was that you faced, when you embarked on your relaunch and what the reasons were for it, so like we said, either just said no organization in the introduction. You've only been at writers for not even a year and you've already launched and relaunched seven newsletters, which is quite a lot.

How very busy

How come there's so much activity in the in this area at Reuters currently, and I'm gonna also advance which is like,

yeah, thanks all for coming. First of all, it's great to see so many people interested in newsletters. I hope you all bring this back to your newsrooms. What you hear here and that you share in your questions later about your experience with newsletters as well. So yeah, so I joined Reuters from from a standard legacy daily newspaper type situation and you might know Reuters as a news agency or for its financial products. But the newsletters are part of a bigger digital strategy to reach a professional audience directly. So I'm part of a new audience team in the newsroom, but we also work very closely in a cross functional team with product marketing sales. They call it colleague Elaine Finn yet just spoke on another panel of other newsletters and so it's really a concerted effort to bring good products to our new newish professional audiences. And as we know, they're the main drivers of one of the main drivers of building loyalty and trust with especially a new readership. So our aim is really to include the best and most relevant Reuters coverage each day and kind of show readers a curated view of what our multimedia journalism excels at. So the daily briefing which I'll talk more about later in this panel, is our biggest newsletter and then we have a lot of industry specific newsletters, which are published, some bi weekly, some weekly, some three times a week and I cover a range of topics. The automotive industry, the energy industry, sustainability, if you're interested in any of these, I suggest you check out reuters.com/newsletters and sign up for free. And also, it's like obviously ties into you know, other editorial and commercial strategies around like events where like our newsletter authors and other reporters and editors speak about these issues, or, or just like the verticals on the website, which cover these topics. So it's all like kind of a part of a bigger, bigger digital strategy. Yeah,

that makes sense. Okay, now, let's hear from you. You have recently revamped your morning newsletter. How long has the morning newsletter approximately around and why did you Atlanta Journal Constitution decided that they wanted to make some updates and you know, change it up a little.

I've been with the AJC since 2016 In the morning newsletter has been around before I even got there. So I'm not sure what the exact year is. But we decided that we wanted to revamp it because we wanted to experiment with making a newsletter product that was more community driven, and the previous iteration of the newsletter was not very community driven. It included a collection of story links that ranged from several different topics. From general news, politics, local government, sports and dining, but it didn't really give us an opportunity to talk back to our readers. So we wanted to give them that opportunity to talk back to us and also introduce different personalities from our newsroom. Sometimes people look at news organizations and it seems a little stuffy. There's no personality, you know, you can't really engage with people but we wanted to let folks know that the AJC does have a personality. We're not very stiff and we thought that revamping our morning newsletter will be a good opportunity to showcase that. We also thought about boosting engagement. Sometimes folks don't know that news rooms offer more than just articles that are online. For example, the AJC offers podcasts we offer video series, documentary series, we have a suite of newsletters, we have an E paper we also have events. So we thought the newsletter would be a great opportunity to do some cross promotion and let folks know and be more aware of everything that we have to offer. So we wanted to start and experiment with our morning newsletter.

Great, thank you. All right, and Alana. So you have been with a post since the beginning of the year, I think. And I think probably we all know the post has many newsletters. We might be subscribed to them or at what stage did you when you got there to the post earlier this year. What stage did you find the newsletter Sweden?

Yeah, so I joined the post in January. And you know, as you said, I'm very lucky we have a very robust you know, long standing newsletter operation. When my memo to for the job one of the things I wrote was we basically have a newsletter for any topic anyone is interested in. So you know, we have more than I think 50 products across the newsroom that are email products. So we have you know, authored newsletters, feed newsletters that are just stories, authored tops with a feed, email alerts and our variety of series that we do. But one thing that became abundantly clear was that making these newsletters was not the best process for everyone. I know no one here can relate to that. And so the post again, they're very, you know, we're very lucky. We have an in house email service provider. So we have developers and engineers and product managers that we're working with constantly to make it better. And so for the last seven months, we've been working on a new template, because right when I started the way it worked was if you wanted a button in a certain kind of newsletter, that was a bespoke template. So if you already had an existing newsletter, you couldn't add the button. If you wanted like a blue logo or a blue background like climate coach, that was a bespoke template. So what we're doing now is rolling out one template to rule them all. And it has, it's called the standard editorial template v two which is very confusing when everyone just refers to it as set v2. And you're like what? And now you all know that so you're lucky. Anyway, so the template is doing two things. One, it is making it so that all of the newsletter teams can customize their newsletters. Any which way there isn't really like a hierarchy around who gets what. And also it helps us make a more streamlined look and feel across our portfolio. So these are newsletters before the transition. And I'll talk about this more about rolling it out. But as you can see, you know, they look a little different again, one's blue, which apparently was very special. And we wanted, you know, we want to make it easier for the writers to make their newsletters look awesome. So we're doing this template.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I think it's really interested interesting to see when all of you share sort of like the jumping off points or the starting points were that you were you found yourself at when you embarked on the relaunch initiative. Because there can be quite different right depending on where you're out when newsletters fit within your organization where they're at within the evolution of the newsletter program itself. And then of course the audience right you all have like very different audiences. So therefore, the reasons and the objectives that you wanted to pursue when you started your relaunch process was very different. And I think this probably rings true for a lot of people in this room. So you know, we're happy to have like these different perspectives and later on when we have the q&a, you can definitely also share any experiences or ideas that you had. And

also, by the way, these are for relaunching, but it applies to launching a newsletter too. It's not just if you have something so in case anyone's like I don't have a newsletter yet. It's okay. That's right.

I will also add that a lot of things that we will mention on this panel we wish we would have done when we initially launched

it. That's a very good point. All right, so let's move on. We've established the goals we have established objectives. Can you walk us through how you actually did this? And I think all of you had like slightly different approaches. Some of the things will probably sound a little bit familiar or repeat themselves in a way where you know, these are just things that like come up often when you work on newsletters. So you did let's start with you. Could you walk us through your relaunch process and you also let me know when I need to advance the slide. Yes.

Yes. So the daily briefing has also been around before before I joined a couple of years, I guess, trying to do the research there and this is what it looked like before we launched the version before the relaunch. We decided to relaunch it in March. Or we decided to relaunch it earlier, but we relaunched it in March 2023. So this year, and we wanted this just to fit our current goals and our audience better which is still like reaching readers directly with our coverage of global events, investigative long form pieces, and also just the fast paced financial news that Reuters is known for, and then increased direct traffic to the website, of course. So first, we started so you can click on it. Yeah, we started by collecting ideas internally in a smaller team to see like, what is it that we actually want to add to this newsletter? What is it that we think it should look like? And there's like, lots of ideas. I don't know if you've been through one of these brainstorming sessions, you can do so many things. And we decided to create three distinct prototypes to really show our readers our audience like three distinct versions. So the first one is this quick news overview, which is just like briefly, like really pointing the readers to what's important today giving like a curated selection, you can go to our newsletter, you know, everything. You can click on links, and then you can go on with your day. And then the second one was to give them more context, a little more like what's behind the news, why this happened? Who wrote the story, maybe some like q&a with a reporter. And then the third one was like trying to like, showcase a little more to financial expertise that we have in our newsroom and like really kind of bridge like the finance world and the global news selection. And obviously, like this, these three versions were also based on like what we already know about our audience through surveys and click rates, but also where we want to bring the newsletter. And then we created an audience survey, which really included just a few questions about the habits but then mainly focused on the these three prototypes, because it's like really useful to see what you get before you make a decision. And really like with a mock up with real content and everything, so it's, it's it takes that ethics That's what I said, we decided before, and then we relaunched in March. Yeah. And then in parallel, we also tested it internally. So we sent out three tests with these prototypes and to like an internal group of stakeholders like quite senior people, people who are like involved in this process and collected feedback, but always would like knowing that we are looking for audience feedback in the first place, and then also at what the newsroom and the broader Reuters stakeholder group thinks. And then it turns out that the audience actually didn't really think that way we thought, and they why they chose the first one. So I think there's another side. Yeah, so this was the final product, which we then obviously tweaked a little bit with. Just like some you know, you see those orange lines and like, really like give it like clarity structure. We also hired two new newsletter authors who started basically a little bit before the relaunch but that was really like a kickstart of their of this new team that is now based that is based in London. And, yeah, it was like nice to see that, you know, our audience had a clear preference. And if there's other options that we would like to include, but we're not including now maybe we can a be tested, or maybe we can include it in other newsletter products in the future.

So you you found out the audience wanted less words than the writer, they

don't want to know so much about how the story.

Surprise, would have thought.

In this case, I always think it's specific to each

well that's why you engage in research right, so cool. Well, thank you very much for sharing that. We'll move on Oh, this this I haven't seen this slide.

Is a overachiever. Look at that slide of mine or not that nice. I'm sorry.

They really cued it up for me. So I'll walk us through it. Yeah, absolutely. Do that. So if I didn't mention before, the newsletter is called am ATL and it is a free daily newsletter that goes out Monday through Friday. I mentioned earlier that it was just a collection of links and when we decided we wanted to revitalize it, the first thing that we did was add voice. And that was quite an interesting process because what we learned was not every reporter has a voice for newsletters. I was one of the people that was in the running one. I did not like it and two, I didn't have the best voice for the newsletter. So after a couple of tryouts, we finally landed on a reporter who was able to be very conversational in his tone, somebody who was able to speak to the audience and not speak at the audience. We also wanted somebody who was able to who's going to be able to guide the reader through the news of the day because sometimes reports and news articles can get complicated in detail. Like your audience didn't want a whole lot of words. We wanted Tyler to be able to get straight to the point. And so that's what he does with the morning newsletter. And then the picture that you see the little picture of the man that's Tyler, so shout out to him. He's very kind and he even wrote this little blurb that you probably can't read there, but it is definitely in his voice. Anytime you open up the newsletter, there's a certain vibe, there's a certain tone that you become familiar with time and time again, and we thought that was really important. The next thing that we did was we had to build a team. A lot of our reporters across the newsroom do multiple things. We are on newsletters, we also do a little bit of podcasting. We do some video and I'm sure that is not unique to just our newsroom, but we thought it was very, very valuable to build one team one succinct team around one newsletter instead of having people doing multiple things. So it really helps us to just narrow the focus. So we have Tyler in place as the writer. We also have a designated editor for the newsletter and a designated copy editor for the newsletter and the designated newsletter producer for this particular newsletter so it was able to we were able to streamline the workflow a little bit better before it was just a one man show. Another thing that we experimented with was in earlier sin time, when I started working on newsletters at the AJC the first version of it was sending at 10am which is not very early at this point you think about lunch, you packed your second cup of coffee, you probably have been on Twitter scrolling, and by the time our newsletter gets out, you know what's already in there. We figured that we were bumped up the same time first it was eight o'clock which was was better. And then we are now averaging at about 5:51am Am I up at 5:51am? Absolutely not. I'm not on this team, but we found that it was valuable to be in people's inboxes when they wake up you want to meet them exactly where they are. And that has been really good for us and you know, the competitive side and US wants to be out. Other folks who have morning newsletters coming out of Atlanta so we are winning that particular race. Another thing that we thought was super important was making signing up for this newsletter. Easy if you go on ajc.com It might be especially if you're going on the site for the first time. It might be difficult for you to figure out where our landing page is for newsletters. Sometimes you gotta get on the page, register login for an account and then when you find the newsletter page, you probably we probably have lost your interest. So we wanted to find a way to make that process very seamless. So what we've done we created one single landing page where the only thing you have to do when you open up that link is to input your email address. You don't have to go through two or three steps just so you can get the newsletter and that has been super, super helpful for us. So you'll see an example of that on the right, the bottom picture at the corner that's what that looks like. Something else we experimented with was just new new features that could give our readers something to look forward to. So a couple of examples that I'm thinking of we have a feature in ATL that is about what happened on this particular news date. And Tyler is really good at sifting through articles from the past from you know, before any of us were born, and he'll find something interesting from that day. Throw and the actual newspaper of what it looked like and give you a breakdown of what was occurring and I don't know 1947 On this day, we also have another feature that's about a quote of the day so we'll pull an interesting quote from the meaning news articles that are on the ajc.com that might really resonate with people. So giving folks that habit and so some of these features that I'm calling out are at the bottom of the newsletter so we want to give folks an opportunity to reach the end of the newsletter and creating the features like this has helped us tremendously. So these are some of the things that we've tried and we believe that they work and if you go to the next slide, you'll be able to see a before and after. So the one that's on the right is the one that was just a collection of links that didn't have any personality. It was getting to your inbox at 10am. And then the next one is what we is the current iteration of am ATL so you get this nice narrative piece at the beginning and you still have other sections of the newsletter, where it goes into dining news, things to do news, local government and politics but Tyler is able to narrate that a little better, and different snippets so you can really see it and then if you want to know more about you know how it looks. There's a QR code right there at the bottom that that easy signup link that I mentioned. You know, I want to put your email address in there. You can see what it looks like but this is the this is the before and after and we're really happy with the product.

How did you get your writer to be okay with that early centime?

Well, Tyler has two young children so he's already up very early, so he only had to adjust his clock by about an hour. So it's okay. And then I think he liked the idea of getting off work earlier. So unlike us being still at work at two o'clock he's,

I don't know picking up the kids writing it that day or the day before the day

before. That's a good question. So he starts scouting what the top story will be the day before so he's not doing all this information or writing all of this at 2am in the morning. He starts the day before for sure. And he tries to focus that top news story specifically on something that's not a breaking news situation, something that that's still timely and relevant but we don't have to wait, you know, on the latest Trump update in order to get them yeah,

just want to make sure obviously that the time that you send it as Do you have the most up to date Exactly.

And sometimes we get up and we realize there is an update that we can quickly make a change to in the newsletter and the other section. So we we address that when we need to.

Cool. Thank you. All right, Ilana, and I know that you engaged in an agile approach, stealing from product development and you engaged also quite a bit in user research and testing right. So really interested to hear how you did that and what you found.

Yeah, so sorry. Um, so this is our before and after. It doesn't actually look strikingly different, which is okay. We did. So yes, we took an agile approach to everything about rolling up this template. We did a lot of research, user research on our newsletters before we designed this set v2 And, you know, we found out things like they felt the newsletters were cluttered. They didn't like divider lines, which hurts my heart. They you know, there was a variety of things. So we rolled this out. Again, we have more than 30 newsletters that are like actual newsletters, not email alerts or series. So we started this off with one newsletter. It's our optimist, the optimist newsletter. It goes out twice a week and it focuses on like happy news. I clearly missed an opportunity to include a plug to sign up but sign up that's my plug. And so what we did was we rolled this out. And we really, you know, the plan was to roll this out to one, get the feedback and meet with the product team and developers and designers. And then add that feedback in and then roll it out across the portfolio. Okay, we can go to the next slide. So this is how we did it. This is very easy, which is nice. So we put this face pile at the bottom of the newsletter. It's just a Google form, which everyone here can use. It's not like a fancy private software. And you know, so we rolled out this template. Normally when you roll out a new design, you're gonna see clicks and probably opens decreased a little bit because people don't like new things. So we were monitoring that to make sure that we didn't see a huge dip. But we also really wanted to hear what people were thinking. So we have this face pile. And each little smiley face or not smiley face is linked back to a Google form. So we can track like with how many people are doing each thing, or liking it, and they also are filling out a Google Form questionnaire. And using this we got a we've been using it a couple of other newsletters too. And we're getting about 10 times the amount of comments and feedback that we normally do when we relaunch things or launch things. So it's been really, really great. And the best part was that people for the optimist like everyone was like, No, this is fine. Like, they weren't like this is the worst. So which you know, again, if we work in news, I feel like that's kind of what I expect to hear most of the time. Like, you suck, I think I was at CNN for too long.

But it's Sorry.

It's true. When we did feedback forms there. It was like, Oh, my I'm sorry. Anyway, so again, with the optimist, we did. So once we rolled it out, we got the feedback then we started doing a B tests. So for the optimist, one of the things we got rid of was article blurbs because we felt that cluttered the design up too much. And a lot of the comments readers were like we missed the article blurbs the headline doesn't tell us enough, and we didn't we really got rid of it from the template. It wasn't like we could easily add it back. So we had to code that back in. And then we did a test we sent four sends this list has a pretty it's one of the posts largest newsletter so it has a pretty large audience. So we don't we got a pretty clear indication with our sens that's why I only did four. So half of the newsletter readers received a version with the blurb, half of them received no blurb and blurb has lost all meaning for me now. Anyway, so the results that were really interesting, every the no blurbed version and always one it got a higher clicks and it got a higher click to open rate. And you know, it goes to show you that your readers you know, they might say something but really it's not necessarily what will work the best.

Data is always your friend if you can get it right. Um, I also I love the face pile. I have worked with an organization in the past. What if you go

on the next slide, they can see the Oh, the blurbs and then those loops? Oh,

sorry. blurbs, no blurbs. Yeah, I love the face pile and the ability to just like sort of like gather really quick feedback from the bottom of your newsletter. One organization I worked with what we did was we had this and constantly and it was just basically like how did you like today's edition and you know, it was sort of like a scale. And that would essentially provide us with a net promoter score. And we could calculate it was connected to a Slack bot, but it also would calculate the averages. So you know we could see like and we would gather like constant feedback. And we could see if there may be you know, was anything that a wasn't working because you know, that happens things break or they're not working editorially. And and then we could you know either address that or it could also help us gather news, some ideas for some changes that we would want to make or some new topics we would want to cover, etc. So, newsletters are so great for gathering audience feedback right away and every edition that you have is an opportunity to do that. So think about that. Okay, thank you for walking us through how you did all of this and each individual case I think this is all really interesting. But I also we you know, we can talk about this without results and lessons learned. So, yeah, I mean, if you you know, I like whoever can think of an answer first, but I mean, since you implemented your changes, what kind of results have you seen where could you see like where perhaps, like really move the needle and like it was an indicator whether what you've done was actually worth it? And perhaps also what some other changes you want to make in the future.

I mean, more for like a workflow question introducing this process and like testing it out with one of our biggest news. Our biggest newsletter really helped us kind of formalize a timeline for launches and re launches. So which Elena and I keep a close watch on. Not really, we try to follow this timeline. We know who does what, when, by when this should be done if we have a launch date and add to it as we like, find out new things that need to happen. So So that's maybe more like a question about the process itself that was really helped by just doing it on like a bigger scale. And so we have like something that we can use for like the development of other newsletters that we have.

And then for us with ama to like you said the data really does matter. So we saw an increase in our open rate, which was super helpful. It went up by about 7%, which was significant for us. And our click to open rate also went up. Tyler loves to use an emoji in the subject line. So I'm wondering if they have anything to do with it. So those were some results that we looked at our data team also they have this magic they were able to implement this scroll depth metric that we now use so you can see how far Yeah, I know that I don't have the nitty gritty details for that but I do take advantage of the feature but you can see how far down a reader got through the newsletter and that's super

helpful. Can you sell that I would buy it

you know that will happen. That's above me I have to touch

so I think with this, this I joined at the post and they were they had already been talking about this process. It was very cross departmental. So it was with you know me editorial, we had product we had design and like newsroom design, because the post has a lot of departments. And what was interesting is what was surprised the other people so you know, we've only rolled out this template to two existing newsletters and all of our new newsletters that we're launching are using it. But the product designer was like why is this taking so long? And partially it's because we want to make sure that readers like this. We don't want it to like mess anything up. And also because I think it takes time like they created something and we're still figuring out if we like it or if we don't like it because it's an It was basically an MVP, like, you know, like the minimum viable product. So we created it. We're adding features to it, you know, so we launched a Barbie newsletter which everyone should clearly have read. And for that we learned that the template didn't really show certain colors like pink and that didn't you know Barbie pink kind of thing. But, you know that was having that kind of live example was so helpful because we learned so much about this template. And so now we're actually in the process of rolling it out to one of our largest newsletters, the posts most and we're implementing a lot of the learnings into that so when we launch it we're not as surprised like, huh, but But yeah, I think, you know, the designers had a very set timeline for when everything would happen. And I think it's important to be flexible with that so that you get a good product at the end and you're not just rushing.

Yeah, it makes sense. I think. I mean, in general, probably one thing that we can talk a little bit more about is stakeholder management, right? Like so how did you work with the different stakeholders involved? Do you face any challenges? If yes, how did you overcome them?

I mean, I guess I mentioned earlier that it's we always made clear that we want to like the audience surveys, what's going to guide our, our decision making with together with feedback from stakeholders. And that means that yes, somebody might really like one version, and they might have a say, but if the audience like I think this was like 45 or 50% of the audience wanted the version one so that's pretty clear. And then we're gonna go that direction and then but also like, you know, keep obviously keep that feedback, write it down like document everything. And then make sure you have it for any new iterations. Any other newsletters you're thinking of to include it in.

I think what was challenging for my team at the beginning of the process was just getting on the same page about what we wanted. The goal of the newsletter to be. We all had different versions of it. And this might seem like an obvious thing to do. But we had a meeting to just level set and brainstorm about the type of audience we were trying to capture. And that helped us move forward. Honestly, we should have did that early in the process. But we did it when we were kind of further down in the weeds, just this level set because you have people who are in senior leadership and folks above that who are not at the ground level that sometimes make it difficult for you to make decisions where everybody's on the same page, but having that meeting that level set really did help us and we did some testing as well. We have three different versions of the newsletter that we did test one was the original version with the links. The second one was the one that we went with. And then the third one was super long, too wordy something that you would see in the newspaper. So a combination of level setting with the team and also doing some audience testing. Those were some of the challenges that we faced but we use them to help us make a final decision.

At what point in a process that you do the level set, would you say?

I'm embarrassed? We went probably they said um, because Okay, so we launched this version in March of this year, and then we level set probably a month or two after that. Just make sure things are going Yeah, yeah,

no, I think this is I mean, it's something that is actually more common. So and we need to talk about this because like this happens, and you know, there's I wouldn't even call it like the failure, right? It's just part of the process. It's like sometimes things don't work out as planned, and that drives innovation in the end, but we have to be honest with ourselves and we have to be honest with the team and also for the audience. Does that make sense? Right. So actually, thank you for sharing that because you know, it makes us vulnerable but at the same time I think it's really important to understand that you know, like this happens and it is an opportunity for improvement, which clearly you've taken the right direction.

Yes, definitely some on the job training. We just were learning as as we went along, and it was really important to remember that we knew we were in experimentation mode. So to your point, you know, it was all worth it. And thank you for saying that vulnerability. is new for me. So I'm working on

and I think you know, a lot of times somebody's like we have to launch this newsletter and it's like an editor who just thinks it's a good idea and you're like okay, but what we're doing at the post now is actually creating jobs and mission statements for each of our newsletters so that everyone across the companies, from sales to the newsroom to you know, whoever I'm proud of everyone knows what that newsletter is supposed to be doing for the company. That's kind of the job. And then the mission is what it's supposed to be doing for the reader. And I think that makes it a lot easier to find a way to create quantifiable goals around success around newsletters, if your newsletter is supposed to be reaching new readers and you're not necessarily gaining new emails or you know, it's not the list isn't growing like you can measure that and see if that success is working. Right. So

I love that. I think everyone should have that for their newsletters. What is the do for the organization? What does it do for the audience? Because then you can see is it actually doing that right? And you have to figure out like, how are you going to measure that? But once you know what you want to measure against, I mean, you're already halfway there. So and then that helps you to figure out what kind of changes you want to make. Or maybe you know, if you have you might depending on how big your newsletter suite is, but like you might find that some of these newsletters are not worth the effort. And then you can have a conversation about what do you do then right rather than just shutting it down? Like can you transform it? Can you fold the audience into something else? So because you've already obviously invested a lot of time and energy into building this audience. So you just don't want to throw it away either.

And I think there's this perception in newsrooms generally that like, well, we have this thing and we can't get rid of it because we've had it for years. And that's not right, always right. I mean, it's very hard. You know, when a product is beloved, but sometimes you know, if your data is really showing you this isn't working, it doesn't make sense to put limited your limited resources into that. And I think being able to have like, these jobs and mission statements is really helping with that and making it you know, it's hard to tell a reporter you're going to send out the newsletter, but I think when they see the data and you're saying like, look, you can spend this time like your work is really great. And it's read a lot on the site. So you now just focus your energy a little bit more on articles on site versus this newsletter. And I think that softens the blow.

Yeah, great point. All right. So we're going to move into the open forum part. Right after this. I just want to call out that we created this handout that has three tips from each of us. to level up your newsletter game you can find it on the session page. It's a PDF, you can download it. Yeah, so you know, just keep that in mind. And with that, we can go to questions. And if you want to share something that worked for you, sorry, I don't know how to operate this. Thank you so much on the front. You can also just say that

it's not on. Thank you. This has been really great. Can you talk a little bit more about layout like you mentioned, people don't like divider lines and people like emojis. So just what.

was going on I'm gonna just repeat this because not everyone might have heard how people reacted to certain changes in the layout like divider lines, colors and just talking a little bit more about these layout changes.

I think we're good. The I mean, it's funny because my, I don't think people may notice certain things that we think are huge. And you so that's one of the reasons why we're AV testing a lot of these changes. You know what, that's why we tested with the blurbs because that was actually kind of like internally. You know, some people were very anti blurbs and some people were very pro blurbs. And but I don't, I don't really think of color is necessarily going to like make or break the newsletter. I think it's more I mean, really the most important thing is that you have a really good subject line. And that matters. The most because if somebody's not opening the newsletter, they're not seeing a color.

However, I have something to add about colors because I have worked on a newsletter relaunch where we updated the hyperlink colors, and we found some accessibility issues. With it because we use like a reddish color I would say like you know, and when you when you have issues, looking at red and green, it just looks like gray. So it really like didn't you know, the links the hyperlinks weren't significant enough. So that's something that we did not test. But we found out after we relaunched the newsletter. And because we had a big enough audience, we got like significant qualitative feedback. So readers literally writing back to us and saying like, I can't see the hyperlinks and we're like, what's going on? It took us a little while to understand what's going on. And then we made the changes right away. Like, you know, updating the hyperlink is not that difficult. And we had to override the designers preference, but, you know, it was worth it.

And one quick example that I'll add to that is that our readers happened to know when we took out the temperature of the day, and they were very upset about that. That was one change that we made Tyler extra feedback via email, and that was the most consistent thing that he got. I want to know the forecast when you say good morning to me so that was interesting.

There is another question the internal poll or is that something specific website? So the face pile tool is no I think we just like found, like icons face like icons. And each little. And this is actually linked in the Google handout. We have the Google doc but no, each thing is it's just an image each three different images and each one is hyperlinked back to the Google Form. And that's it and it's really, really easy to do it. You know, it's free again, which is really nice. So I would highly recommend doing that.

Okay, I have a couple of questions over there. The you we had just had eye contact

letters when it comes to streamlining, the templates are with, you know, content arrangement for those new collections and optimizes for AI or different tools to optimize.

So the question was about, I guess, optimizing the content or the order of the content for each reader and using AI for that. Is anyone doing that?

been optimizing newsletters purchase with confidence in that. Sorry, I didn't hear that for you. Yeah. So optimizing the content of each use that or while also streamlining the design. Yeah. Well, I can only say so we adopt this. This one was kind of like the most in the relaunch where we really put the most effort in and really tried to like, you know, do it right. And we found out certain like certains streamlining ideas for for the newsletter. templates that we then also included in our other newsletter templates without making them look exactly like this flagship one. And I think I mean, I guess what's most important is to actually keep it as simple as you can while still maintaining kind of your brand. presence because that's when you can best kind of work with AI tools or other type of tools that like, you know, are rearranging our AP testing without having to like, go and like redo the whole template every time because it's just, yeah, it's just easier to manage.

Yeah, I would just add that I guess for these more like, personalized newsletters that you can have for each individual user. That's maybe like, we didn't really talk about that because it's more something that usually you can apply technology to. There's tools to do that. These are more like, conceptually like building a product. That is near and then a newsletter that is looks the same for every for every reader. Okay, you had your hand up for a while. About about

the process like what kind of goes into decision making around you know,

like, this is gonna be you know, Outlook frequency.

Okay, question was you launched a Barbie newsletter what kind of thinking went into that, like, you know, why, why a Barbie newsletter? And how often you want to send it. I would probably also add to that. What are you going to do with this audience when you're done with your Barbie newsletter?

Oh, let me tell you um, so the Barbie newsletter was an experiment that I did with our next gen. Director Phoebe Connelly. And we approached it just like that as an experiment. We, you know, decided we would do it the Sunday before the movie launched and then do we want to do like four or five sessions in that one week because why not? You know, so we didn't. I think we were taking the approach of this as an experiment. We want to see what happens. And that was why we did it because I think it's really important to experiment. And not get too stuck in your own ways, which is hard at like large legacy newsrooms. I think so you know, we just wanted to do something fun the post didn't really obviously have anything else like a Barbie newsletter. And you know, we had a freelancer write it we had the divider lines. Were little Barbie shoes, which I loved. And we're going to actually use that list to seed our new style newsletter that is launching on September 8. So they'll also that was the other part of Barbie as we were launching it so because we it was a part of our style section. And we knew we wanted to use that list later on for this other newsletter.

So it's a pop up newsletter that's going to feed into a new permanent newsletter. Okay, cool. I'm gonna take a question from the middle there. Yes, you're with a mask or does there's somebody writing a newsletter?

Like what is going on? Did you hear that? I think the question was about figuring out the staffing around a newsletter, right like, in one case you mentioned you had a freelance writer versus obviously you can, you know, get a writer from your team. And then you know, you have might have an audience team, you might have a producer. Yeah. So how do you how do you figure that out?

Well, you I mean, you could you could censor,

I'm sorry, I don't know monopolize the conversation.

I mentioned earlier that we went through about four newsletter writers before we got it right. But I think it just depends on the goal of the newsletter. We wanted our am newsletter to be really conversational, and for the audience to feel comfortable to talk back to us and create those kinds of feedback loops. So we knew that our tone needed to be a little bit more laid back and something that you wouldn't see in the newspaper or on the website, you want to feel like you're talking to a friend and not everybody can write like that. But Tyler hit it. Hit the what was the phrase hit the nail on the head, he was able to encompass all of those all of those qualities.

I would also add that one thing that I think is important to keep in mind when you are, I mean, either when you're at the very beginning or launching a newsletter, or when you're relaunching you're thinking about making some changes is you know, when it comes to staffing and team is this sustainable. So, you know, what do you do when you're, you know, obviously, you probably will need a writer or someone who puts together maybe an editor, a producer, you know, depends on your workflow, but what happens when one of these people is what happens when they're on vacation? If you have something like a daily newsletter, this is it's not usually it's not sustainable to have the same person write the daily newsletter every day.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And Tyler, he is a formal local government reporter and once he started writing this newsletter that it is now his full time job. He is now the designated newsletter writer. That is what he does every day and we do have we do have plans for when he's on vacation like he went to Italy. For about two weeks. So we had to fill in for him. And for him, yeah, good for him. He didn't have to wake up very early in the morning while he was in Italy.

This is important like this is really like because it's not good for the newsletter and the audience when the writer burns out, obviously. So really good question. Important thing to keep in mind.

You can all come up and talk to us after this. And there's also a newsletter. Session conversation happening right after year. So

So I still have four minutes. I'm going to take a few more questions. You would the shirt. Someone wearing a shirt?

Newsletter analytics product. And we'll get people paid about their newsletters performing, but that goes so far as you can give useful, direct feedback and have conversations from years about like how do you deliver feedback? This is too long. Write this differently our data showing this I generally like to down Are you out right I just how do you how often have you got this conversation?

Okay, I'm gonna repeat this question real quick for other people in the room. I think it's again, I would put this in a stakeholder management corner. How do you go about delivering feedback to people who are involved in a newsletter production process? So though, right, like you just said the writer, if for example, you find a newsletter is too long. How do you have that conversation?

So that's kind of my job which is fun. Mostly. So I mean, Elena and I, we both you know, share data, frequently weekly, monthly. And and in this data and context, right, what does this mean for the newsletter? Also, like, you know, these are the top three click links, but where did you actually put them in the newsletter? When like, sometimes, we know that this is a little anecdote, I want to give us that we know that Reuters is known for global news like trusted right we have like big coverage of the war in Ukraine and that's one of our most clicked like we always know like Ukraine stories are always going to click but we also see that our last section is and finally section which has a little more like fun, uplifting. stories that go beyond like the breaking news that that one also clicks really well. So we want to keep that in even though we know our audience likes the whole serious news part of it. But I like share when I shared a weekly or monthly reports with the writers and also just after a newsletter gets sent sometimes I will like just send them a couple paragraphs of like, okay, this went well and maybe this one for next time. Just keep in mind like subject lines are too long and are because it's such a big newsroom and global and people are awake at different times of the day. I can't always just be there before the newsletter gets sent right but then just to be like always like in touch about it and not in like, like, way where you like scold anyone for forgetting something or for not doing it the way it maybe would perform better but just like giving advice like this is something I saw somewhere else we maybe you can try that or we do you like a be testing like segments where we don't see oh, people will click more if you like keep those blurbs shorter or keep those paragraphs shorter and put the link at this point instead of that one. So really, like be constructive about it, I guess.

Yeah. I think it's like giving feedback in any situation you want. It's also about really having a good relationship with the writer and not only coming to them to be negative and finding a way to you know, frame it as you're putting all this work into this product. You want it to be read right like you don't want people to not be reading it. So I found that helps because everyone wants their product to be better. And every newsletter is too long. That is just a fact. Every news newsletter is too long. A politico playbook was like 3000 words on average, and even they were like the writers were like, yes, it's too long. But you know, so it's always too long does just remember that when you're writing and think about how your newsletter writers tend to stop thinking about how they read. Once they're writing something happens they change. So there's that because that's the only thing I do is I say like so how do you read newsletters? And they're like, Oh, I scroll. And I'm like, Huh, interesting. But, you know, again, it's about having that relationship and really focusing on making a good product because nobody wants they're putting so much time and effort into this. They don't want like it to be bad. They want it to be good. So, you know, you don't want to go up and be like, hey, this sucks because this is 3000 words like my hand hurts from scrolling. You know, there are other ways to frame the conversation.

Right? Yeah. I love that. You said focus on it being a good product, which means it's not just the content. It's not just the layout. It's not just the design, not just the same time. It's not just any of the things by themselves, but all of them together, right so that makes a good news that our product and that all of those together if you have more than one use that our product makes it really good. Use that our program. With that we are two minutes over now so I'm going to officially release anyone who would like to go and do whatever and we still here to get 20 Thank you

Okay,

all right. Thanks. Yeah. Oh,

sorry. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So much

I see

that you maybe

it depends on what your newsletter is Java or Alexa. Like, I think you have to know who your audience is in order to write something. So if you're new today are

what I would say like, keep it

short, useful cutters suggest like people do all that really move off.

Yeah, really, but it does depend a lot on who your audience is. Because if you're

writing you're trying to reach people really well.

That's really different than if you're like doing

something is good ideas.

Good luck and even doing it started in June.

I don't know how to write

a file righty so basically Charlotte

actually has

all these

things do

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that I had a very specific question to transition away from you since you're writing on time because you want to talk about that. I guess we can just have a couple of choices me see I mean, is there anything else is that it's it's I suppose I could see why that was. I get somebody that

looks like this I guess I would say

five minutes because that would that the people that

like me

job is your job is

really to get back.

So for whatever doesn't find that effective. And we also performed that our product design team. I don't know I gave that we

did a lot of research on that decision.

I now have it built so that you can hit a button.

Always do bring it back. But I guess it's working out we can change it if we want to. Yeah, I haven't seen last straw

Yeah, I think research.

We like a lot. We did research on what

it was like to redesign the site. They weren't very efficient but yeah, I know it. My now yet remember.

Stay in here for more

I don't

have to teach anymore

right now,

one question. Anything right. Interrupts Interesting. Okay, so it's fair to say thanks for saying that. It's very hard to execution as for TCP IP touring for

like a bunch of people like do the fun place like ask questions to save space for you. But I really liked that

did that get a lot of traffic? Well as I was already in stage three too bad. For other men, we have to find out exactly what is going on. Right and that drama Yeah. So slightly above average. Things

sorry. As far as Yeah, I

was the original version that was this is that one actually did? Yes. Yeah. Do you? I mean, if you want to be right for what it was originally. So

yeah, it's like,

No, we're just we just want to make sure that we know how to do this. Do you use a Mac. Is there a reason why not? Well, if you give me a Slack

sorry, okay.

Now, we're gonna get straight

to it. I just hope I should maybe go get my choice for you.

I should get my church

Okay, yeah Wow

two hours

I was able to

I might have to be logged in for you

might need to be logged in. Because this is your presentation. Okay. Do you want to log in to the office

Yeah, to push through your thoughts Oh, that's that's your skirt. So I am here

you have to check your

promotions like let me

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Yeah,

there's the president. Yeah.

Fix the typo. I have solved Okay. So let me show you. So what I find is

really super simple.

It's like, do you want to just

got your hair probably leave that

before Yeah. And then we just have the discussion, and I got it down to five. Perfect.

Did you have anything else you wanted to add here?

No. No, no. And I think it's perfect

right yeah.

Yeah, after that, I guess I we want to have participation from people.

I I'm sorry to interrupt. But that's my guess. I just want to figure out if I You what time is this. So man, we're glad

All right. Thanks. Sorry. Yes.

I mean, it was like technology.

A little

down

know I'm like on the other end of the beginning of that

yeah

thank you. Thank you Good, tired. The basics just came down for like 30 seconds. Yeah, she

she's. Right now she's gonna back up.

To make her neck so like you. Do we have memories

in our case, we use it and I'm super patient because I thought it was like I wanted to translate

us

so I try to inspire people to walk around midway to have like a few ideas.

Day