At The Audiencers’ Newsletter Workshop in New York in March 2024, Kelly Poe of The Washington Post shared how they’ve worked to increase click through rates across their newsletter portfolio.
Below you’ll find 5 low-lift strategies that Kelly shared during this session, including case study examples from some of The Washington Post’s newsletters.
First things first, why does The Washington Post care about click-through rates?
- To drive traffic to the WP site
- Clicks are a more reliable measure of engagement in a post-iOS privacy settings world
- If people are clicking, they’re finding things they’re interested in, and that will keep them coming back to the newsletter. This is true even if your newsletter is designed to be inbox-exclusive!
5 low-lift strategies to increase newsletter CTRs
- Work with writers to use curiosity gaps. A lot of audience engagement professionals are familiar with using curiosity gaps – the idea that you give away enough information to compel people to keep reading, but withholding enough that people will click – but the same concept applies in newsletters that are designed to drive people to your website.
- Draw from archives. This strategy is valuable for legacy news organizations, especially with recognizable brands or writers and evergreen content.
- Give habit-forming products a place in the newsletter, even if it’s not super relevant. For instance quizzes, such as WP’s “On the Record” quiz that they promote in most newsletters, even though it has little to do with most of their content. “We produce it in the newsroom, so it is part of our journalism. In some of our newsletters that are designed to be more of an inbox experience, we’ve actually noticed sustained higher click-through rates since we’ve introduced the quiz. “
- Solicit 1-click feedback (and monitor it). “When we built our new feedback system, we didn’t expect it to also raise click-through rates. Initially, we had a small text-only feedback request at the bottom of newsletters but wanted something easier for users. We created a two-click feedback form using Google Forms, allowing us to preload responses. The form featured a smiley face to indicate liking the new design and space for additional feedback. Running this form daily in one newsletter, we received as much feedback in one month as we had in the previous six. This design significantly lowered the mental barrier for taking our survey.”
- Always be testing. At The Washington Post, they’re almost always running some A/B test in the background. Kelly recommends ensuring you have a clear hypothesis, that you set a time period, that you measure results, see where else you can implement learnings and remember that the same strategy might not work the same in every newsletter.
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