1The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

2The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

The Essential Guide to Email for Media and PublishingSendGrid helps thousands of media/publishing companies deliver email to their recipients every day. SendGrid’s platform is an ideal solution for many of these companies because we send both transactional and marketing email.

In addition to meeting all the email needs of media and publishing senders, SendGrid is the industry leader when it comes to cus-tomer support, deliverability, and email expertise. This guide is designed to help media/publishing companies:

1. Learn how other media and publishing companies lever-age email for business success

2. Compare email engagement metrics to industry-wide benchmarks

3. Get delivery best practices for media and publishing

4. Determine what changes will improve email performance

2The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

3The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

How Media and Publishing Companies Leverage EmailMedia and publishing companies use both transactional emails and marketing emails to help their businesses succeed:

• Transactional Email - Messages sent to recipients to facilitate an action or transaction. Common types include subscription confirmations, account notifications, password changes and other essential emails.

• Marketing Email - Commercial or promotional messages like weekly and monthly newsletters, new content updates, and other campaigns designed to drive engagement, revenue, and brand awareness.

No matter how great your email is, if it doesn’t get delivered to your recipient correctly, it’s not helping your business. As a deliv-ery-first ESP, we focus on providing industry-leading support as well as Expert Services to help customers get their messages delivered to the inbox.

Media and Publishing Use Cases and Expert AdviceTo help other media and publishing companies gain insight into the world of email in their industry, we reached out to a few Send-Grid customers to see what their businesses look like and how they use email.

4The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

JustRunLah! is Asia’s leading running and fitness website, hailing from Singa-pore. Since its launch in 2014, the site has become the preferred online desti-nation for runners and active individuals sourcing for event calendars, news, reviews, tips, exclusive discounts, and travel recommendations. It is comple-mented by Asia’s first mobile app for running, JustRaceLah!, which is an inno-vative tool that allows members to discover races and track their performance improvement over time.

How often do you publish new content on your website?We currently have a pool of about 100 bloggers who review races, products, and write about their running experiences. That’s on top of our authors and staff. In terms of articles, posts, and reviews, anything from 1 to 10 posts per day.

How many subscribers/recipients do you have?We have about 60,000 subscribed members, both in our mailing list and our mobile app.

How important is email for your business? How does it help you drive revenue?We are using emails mostly as a means of keep-ing engagement and retention rates high, rather than driving revenue directly.

How does your email strategy differ from other types of communication, like social media?We’re focusing more on action and event-driven communications rather than traditional newslet-ters. We want each recipient to receive a person-alised email that is relevant to them.

What advice would you give a new online pub-lishing business or email sender about email?Let people know what to expect if they subscribe to your mailing lists, and only send your sub-scribers content they want to receive. It can get tempting to keep bombarding people with links to your latest products or promotions as your user base grows, but that won’t do much good.

Ju

stRu

nlah

! Use C

ase and

Exp

ert Ad

vice

5The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

FashioNZ is New Zealand’s longest running fashion website and has been online since August 1998. It’s updated daily with fashion news, interviews, reviews, competitions, and related fashion and beauty content. The site has a loyal following in New Zeraland and overseas, and it’s also a hub for the local fashion industry with designers, brands, recruiters, fashion schools, and styl-ists represented on the site and in the online store. The original aim of Fash-ioNZ was to showcase New Zealand fashion to Kiwis and to the world, and that continues to be our passion today.

How often do you publish new content on your website?We publish new content daily which is a mix of news stories, interviews, reviews, competitions, lookbooks, job listings, and other fashion industry content.

How many subscribers/recipients do you have?Currently, we have over 38,000 subscribers.

How important is email for your business? How does it help you drive revenue?Email is very important. Our weekly newsletter is a great way to share each week’s content with our readers all at once and always drives a strong peak in traffic. Our clients pay for space in our newsletter as it reaches a wider audience than most of their own databases and always has good engagement.

How does your email strategy differ from other types of communication, like social media?Our eDM is curated and collated carefully to present all of our week’s content together in a way that means the reader can pick and choose what they want to read. On social media, we pro-mote our content one story at a time. We spend a good deal of time each week on the presentation and layout of our newsletter and it always has a personal introduction to help the reader connect with the content.

We also run a competition each week giving a new prize to make our newsletter

even more enticing which is a strategy that works well for us and increases the newsletter’s open rate and engagement.

What advice would you give a new online pub-lishing business or email sender about email?We have a few pieces of advice we’d give other media and publishing senders:• Strong visuals are really important - We

make sure each week’s newsletter loads quickly while looking good.

• Content is king - We pick our best stories to lead and keep in mind what our audience is most interested in. We try to keep emails con-cise by giving each piece of content only one sentence to draw you in. People have short attention spans, so you have to make sure everything is really engaging.

• Layout is really important - We try and make our emails look clean and not too cluttered even though there are usually 8 - 10 pieces of content in them.

• Consistency is key - Our emails go out every Tuesday at the same time, and we always deliver regardless of what else is going on in the business.

• Proof and double-check everything, es-pecially links - A broken link can cost you valuable traffic to your site, and if people are put off when they can’t get to what they want, they’ll likely give up. You don’t want to lose that customer.

FashioN

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6The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

Compare Your Email ProgramWe help thousands of senders in the media and publishing industry deliver mail to their recipients.

If you’re a media or publishing company, you want to make sure your email program is working and optimized. One of the ways you can check the health of your email program is by comparing your engagement metrics to industry averages and other media and publishing senders.

Metrics like average monthly send rate, unique open rate, and unique click rate are all significant and relate to each other. In our 2017 Global Email Benchmark Report, we looked at media and publishing companies that send email through SendGrid to determine what their average engagement statistics look like:

132017 GLOBAL EMAIL BENCHMARK REPORTPRESENTED BY

2017 2016

Media/Publishing

Changes from 2016

• Mobile device usage increased from 51% to 65%

• Male vs. female recipients changed from being 58% female to being an even split

• Monthly send rate increased from 4 messages per month to 6, but engagement increased as well: open rate (19% to 31%), unique open rate (9% to 16%), and unique click rate (1.8% to 3.3%)

One of the few industries that was able to increase their sending frequency and also increase unique open rate and unique click rate!

MONTHLYSEND RATE

UNIQUE OPEN RATE

OPEN RATE

UNIQUE CLICK RATE

CLICK RATE

UNIQUE CLICK-TO-OPEN

MALE RECIPIENTS

FEMALE RECIPIENTS

MOBILE DEVICES

NON-MOBILE DEVICES

16%9%

19.3%

1.8%

20.3%

50%

50%

51%

49%

7.9%

31%

3.3%

20%

42%

58%

65%

35%

5.1%

6 4

7The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

As a company within this industry, use these numbers as bench-marks. If you’re beating the industry averages, we suggest you continue implementing good sending habits. You can scroll down to the Delivery Best Practices section to learn more.

If your engagement metrics are well below the industry average, you may need to make some changes. In these situations, you may want to check out our 2017 Email Deliverability Guide or our 2017 Tips and Tricks to Stay Out of the Spam Folder Guide.

Delivery Best Practices for Media and PublishingMany email marketers in the media and publishing industry often focus on small tweaks they can implement to increase clicks or opens on individual sends. Increasing engagement when possible is always great, but you also want to make sure emails are arriving in the right place and getting your message in front of as many people as possible.

Below are a couple of delivery tips media and publishing senders can implement to increase the likelihood that your messages are placed in your recipients’ inboxes:

Continue testing sending frequency

The media and publishing indus-try was one of a few industries that was able to increase their av-erage sending frequency as well as their average unique open rate from 2016 to 2017. While this is a great trend, each sender should test the number of emails theysend to their recipients each month to determine what the optimal amount is. You can learn more about avoiding email fatigue and improving your sending frequency on SendGrid’s blog.

8The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

Segment streams and use separate IPs

Smaller media and publishing send-ers who send fewer than 30,000 or 40,000 emails each month may be fine sending email from a shared IP, but larger senders should be more strategic.

As you scale your email to 50,000 messages per month and beyond, thoughtful segmentation strategies need to be implemented. One of the first changes you should make as your email program grows is to send transactional email and marketing from separate IPs.

For more tips and advice on scaling your email program from the tens of thousands into the millions, read our new resource: How to Send High Volume Email: SendGrid’s Smart Scaling Guide.

Changes to be ConsideredWhether your goal is to determine how many emails you’re aspir-ing to send, or simply learning what you should prepare for in the future, there are a lot of email tactics that you should consider implementing and some to avoid completely:

Don’t buy or migrate lists

Not only is buying contact lists against SendGrid’s terms of ser-vice, it’s a proven way to negatively impact your ability to get mes-sages delivered to the inbox and not the junk/spam folder.

SendGrid Customer Spotlight

The Recipe Rebel The Recipe Rebel

is a food and cooking blog that was

created as a way to share easy, mostly

healthy, fun and creative recipes for the

whole family with other food lovers

and home cooks. New content is shared

often and email is leveraged to confirm

subscribers and to message recipients

about new posts and menus.

9The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

If you buy a list and begin sending email to those contacts, recip-ients aren’t going to know who you are or what your business is, and they going to be a lot more likely to mark your email as spam. For more tips on growing your recipient list the right way, visit our interactive How to Grow Your Email Marketing List Guide.

Send a confirmation email

Sending a confirmation email to people who have provided their email address allows you to provide your new subscriber with more information about the types of emails they’ll receive. It also provides a way for them to re-confirm that they want your email in the future, making them a lot more likely to engage with future sends.

Inform recipients of frequency

Be clear with your subscribers about how often you will email them. Whether you do it at the point of address collection, or you include some frequency information in your confirmation email, letting people know how often you’ll be sending messages, and when you post new content, is a great idea.

When recipients can anticipate your messages, they’ll be likely to open them and click the links within.

Create a preference center

A preference center allows recipi-ents to choose which emails they

prefer to receive. While this may seem like a way for people to limit the ways you can message them, recipients are really raising their hands and telling you exactly what types of messages they’d like receive. For media and publishing companies, you could provide recipients with the different categories or subjects of posts you have on your site so recipients can select those they are most interested in.

SendGrid Customer Spotlight

Speedy Publishing Speedy Publishing

LLC is a hybrid book publishing

company that is geared towards giving

the author and writer the power to

build their brand, market and distribute

their content just the way they want.

Giving them the freedom to choose how

involved they are in the book publishing

process and, more importantly,

lets the author and writer focus on

what is important to them–creating

entertaining and high quality content

that will deliver value to the customer.

10The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

Let customers opt-out

While a preference center allows customers to tell you which types of email they’d like to receive, you can also allow them to tell you which emails they’d prefer to NOT receive. By using a tool like unsubscribe groups in Marketing Campaigns, customers can remove themselves from different streams of emails they’re cur-rently receiving.

Keep things personal

One of the best things you can do is try to keep things as personal as possible. Address recipients by name, send them content that they’ve expressed interest in, and make sure they’re getting subject lines they’re interested in. The more a recipient feels like your email is for them specifically, the better.

SendGrid Customer Spotlight

Learn Code the Hard Way Learn

Code the Hard Way was created and

authored by Zed A. Shaw as a way to

help people learn the basics of computer

programming. Learn Code the Hard

Way provides beginner programmers

with the tools they need to start

programming, including a professional

PDF of the course text, HD video

tutorials of each programming exercise,

technical support, and free updates

when new editions are released. The

programming languages covered by

Learn Code the Hard Way include

Python, Ruby, C, SQL, Javascript,

and others.

11The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

Why Media and Publishing Companies Choose SendGridWhen the success of your business is based on your ability to communicate with your customers, having a scalable, reliable email service provider is critical. SendGrid’s platform allows media and publishing companies to send 1-to-1 transactional emails as well as personalized 1-to-many marketing emails..

In addition to sending email that will grow your business, we have email experts and support staff ready to help you fine-tune your email program. We’re trusted by over 50,000 paying global customers—big and small—to drive engagement and business growth through their email program.

Some of the most well known media and publishing companies across the globe use SendGrid including:

THE KRAZY COUPON LADY

12The Essential Guide to Email for Media and Publishing

About SendGridSendGrid helps you focus on your business without the cost and complexity of owning and maintaining an email infra-structure. We help with all technical details (from whitela-beling to DKIM) and offer world-class deliverability expertise to help your emails reach the inbox. And with a full-featured marketing email service that offers an intuitive workflow, effortless list segmentation, and actionable analytics, all of

your email needs are met in one simple platform.

Learn More

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