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The Best of the Best:Media and Publishing

Newsletter EditionHow to Optimize Your Email Newsletter for

Retention — And the Brands Who Get it Right

@Sailthru

82%of publishing and media marketers use email marketing…

And over the past 6 months,

53% of publishershave increased their email newsletter frequency...

But on a good day,

and clickthrough

rates are as low as 2.2%...

subscriber open rates barely peak

at 16%

Where does this leave the industry?

Traffic and pageviews can now make or break your revenue...

When it comes to digital news organizations, the majority of digital revenue comes from display ads, which grew 27% in 2014 ($10.9 billion).

While email typically drives an average of 10% of overall traffic,

email subscribers consistently generate the highest pageviews, return rates and

subscription rates of all readers.

And don’t forget,

for every dollar spent on an email campaign, the average return on investment is $44.25.Conversions from email far exceed the ROI marketers will achieve from social media, retargeting and other modern digital marketing efforts...

In order to better monetize, digital publishers are challenged to provide value

to both readers and advertisers.So, how can you optimize your newsletters

to increase retention and engagement?

Business Insider, the fastest growing business news publisher in the world, leverages Sailthru’s email personalization technology and

have increased email revenue through our approach to behavioral email, predictive segmentation and 1:1 personalization.

CHECK OUT CASE STUDY NOW

@Sailthru

In this slideshare, we’ll showcase publishers that are effectively championing their email marketing

with personalization, engagement and design.Learn who is doing it right, and insights

for how to apply the same leading practices to your own email strategy.

The Best of the Best: Personalization

1

Business Insider highlights their vast library of content by personalizing their daily newsletters.

Content is dynamically populated by Sailthru’s personalization algorithm so subscribers receive unique newsletters, filled with the stories they’re most interested. It also cuts the time their team spends on email in half!

Business Insider

The Best of the Best: Personalization

The results?

A whopping 60% increase in email clickthrough rates!

Mashable is taking personalization beyond content. When a reader signs up for emails, Mashable can select how often and what type of content they want to receive.

By taking into account the preferred cadence and content types for each subscriber, they are creating a tailored experience for every reader.

MashableThe Best of the Best: Personalization

If you’re looking for that extra boost in opens, clicks, and pageviews, we suggest investing in a technology

that can automate personalized send times.

When publishers measure personalized send time vs. standard batch and blast, the personalized send time

outperformed the others in opens, clicks AND pageviews...

See the results for yourself:

11%increase in open rate

4%increase in

click-to-open

10% increase in

pageviews per thousand users

The Best of the Best: Engagement

2

With the listen feature, Huffington Post subscribers can engage with their morning email without having to do anything at all...except press play.

This is a seamless way to engage your readers with your content that is quick, easy and accessible.

Huffington PostThe Best of the Best: Engagement

If you’re looking for a great way to keep readers engaged, take a page out of Maxim’s book. In their This Week in Maxim newsletter, popular or trending content is curated and served to the reader to let readers quickly access the hottest content of the week. And because people often times gravitate towards what other people are reading, Maxim has seen killer engagement from this newsletter.

MaximThe Best of the Best: Engagement

If you don’t have the bandwidth to offer your readers a recorded version of your newsletter, keep it simple like Vanity Fair does with their Cocktail Hour newsletter. This timely newsletter gives subscribers some conversation topics to discuss over drinks with friends or just on your commute home!

Vanity FairThe Best of the Best: Engagement

The Best of the Best: Design

3

The combination of stunning imagery and photography that National Geographic is known for is beautifully crafted alongside engaging videos for their email subscribers to enjoy.

National GeographicThe Best of the Best: Design

Mashable comes in again on our list because of their simple but optimized Top Stories template. This particular template is a tried-and-true combination of creative and copy, with a spot-on content hierarchy that fosters incredible pageview generation.

MashableThe Best of the Best: Design

With the introduction of Moments, Twitter users now have the option to view top trending news stories about politics, movies, sports and more all in one feed. They have also taken this user experience to email, curating these top trending stories and delivering them straight to a subscriber’s inbox. Crafted in a simple design, Twitter users can easily engage with the stories they choose and share their favorite topics with their followers seamlessly.

TwitterThe Best of the Best: Design

With all these examples on best-in-class email newsletters, you may be tempted to hit the ground running on all new emails.

But you cannot forget a critical element to your email strategy: TESTING!

Before you roll out big optimizations or redesign your templates, you should create a testing plan. Test newsletter elements tactic by tactic to learn what truly resonates with your subscribers — if you implement changes all at once, it won’t be clear what’s affecting success.

Let us know what you plan to test first — tweet to us @Sailthru!

Business Insider, the fastest growing business news publisher in the world, leverages Sailthru’s email personalization technology and

have increased email revenue through our approach to behavioral email, predictive segmentation and 1:1 personalization.

CHECK OUT CASE STUDY NOW

@Sailthru