Building a Subscriber Base and Enforcing Reader Retention

In this week’s readings, I learned more about how to grow a subscriber base from 0 to 1,000.

Here are the parts I found most interesting and insightful.

Testing Subject Lines

It almost sounds like beta testing, but it’s being used on actual consumers. According to “The Real Reason Why Morning Brew Grew to 1.5 Million Subs in 5 Years,” the newsletter does an A/B test subject lines by releasing batches of emails at different times. Further explained in “Engagement beats scale: Inside Morning Brew’s approach to subscriber growth,” tested subject lines are sent out at 5 a.m. and the succesful ones are sent out to the rest of the audience at 6 a.m.

Stay Concise

It’s no question that in this generation readers’ attention spans are limited. That is why it’s best to include pattern breaks in the structure. A good form to use is bullet points or to highlight key points in bold text.

A new insight was to never use more than four of five lines of text to keep the newlestter easy to read.

Add Personalization

Include options that allow readers to feel like they are investing in the newsletter. Include interactive elements, such as voting widgets.

Allow readers to customize the newsletter they receive. This can be done by providing them an option of which sections or information they want to receive in their newsletter copy.

Grab Attention

Attention can be grabbed in ways other than story structure and images.

Utilize your information and research to create graphs and data. Include GIFs when possible and create stand-out headlines.

Keywords

This is probably the most important tool in SEO. A new insight I learned about keywords is that there are free tools allowing you to navigate them. This includes Google’s keyword planner, Uber Suggest and Keywords Everywhere.

In “How I Get My Blog Posts To Rank On Google (Every Single Time),” I also learned more about where keywords can be included. Instead of just in the headline and article, they can be included in the post URL, image alt descriptions, mets descriptions and subheadings.

When creating a newsletter, it’s important to remember these factors in order to engage and increase retention of your audience. And don’t forget to add keywords, because in order to build an audience, they need to be able to find your content!