How to make audience research quick and scrappy
Leveraging email newsletters to learn about your audiences
Hi there — It’s been a minute. We hope you’re holding up okay. We’ve been putting our heads together to scheme our next steps in the newsletter wizarding world and beyond. We’re going to get back to blogging, and we’re also making moves toward a newsletter product of our own. Stay tuned, and drop us your email address here if you’d like to stay in the loop!
Cheers,
Emily & Carrie
Last week, the Newsletter Wizards joined forces with Faye Teng at the Lenfest Local Lab to talk about the power of newsletters at ONA20. Our session was called “Quick and Scrappy Audience Research” and highlighted the many ways email newsletters can teach you about your audiences, both for your newsletter products and for your audiences writ large. Amazingly, over 200 people joined our session to learn about this framework for generating audience insights quickly. That’s a lot of newsletter wizards!
In this post, we summarize key points from our presentation. If you want to see the slides yourself, check out our full presentation here.
First, we reviewed why we’re all so obsessed with email newsletters in the first place.
Apart from being a platform to learn about your audiences, they’re also a vehicle for revenue generation. In this presentation, we focused on the magical power of newsletters to act as mini-intelligence machines to get to know your audiences.
We then introduced our framework for audience research (see below).
Faye Teng of the Lenfest Local Lab produced this diagram, which represents four key steps: Explore (i.e. look into concepts), Evaluate (i.e. define a product), Iterate (i.e. analyze product features) and Launch (i.e. get that product out the door). The Newsletter Wizards especially appreciated the cyclical nature of this diagram — emphasizing how the Iterate and Launch relationship is an ongoing one.
You can probably see why we love applying this audience research framework to newsletters. Explore means scanning the field to see if newsletters might be a good product to serve your audiences. Evaluate is when you might send out an initial survey to your audiences or email list testing a few newsletter features or ideas. Iterate and Launch — that everlasting cycle — are when you get that newsletter product out the door, then continuously test and tinker to fit the newsletter to the needs of your readers.
Okay, but here’s the thing.
We know from our work with newsrooms that the diagram above represents the ideal, and not everyone working in a newsroom or as an independent newsletter writer has the time or resources to march through this process. So, we’ve devised a method to get started. It’s called the Quick and Scrappy (™, lol) approach. Here’s what it’s all about:
In the rest of our session, we gave concrete examples from newsrooms who have followed the Quick and Scrappy approach to audience research through newsletters.
We provided examples to match the four-step audience research process from the Lenfest Local Lab outlined above.
EXPLORE: This is the earliest stage in the audience research process when you might be thinking, “Is a newsletter even the right product for my audiences?” or “Does anyone else already produce a newsletter on [insert great idea here]?” What we see most commonly in this phase, when applied to newsletters, are landscape analyses (conducting research to see what’s already out there, usually resulting in a very elaborate Excel sheet), early surveys to an existing email list to assess if another newsletter is wanted, or interviews with folks in your target newsletter audience.
Faye gave the example from The Lenfest Local Lab’s Neighborhood Newsletter project, in which their team conducted a survey (see above) to determine the core information needs of folks in Fishtown. Conducting a survey like this one is the ideal, but if you don’t have the time or resources to do this well (and analyze the data well), we recommend embracing our tips below.
EVALUATE: This is when you have some early data back from the “explore” process and want to apply what you’ve learned to your newsletter product. It’s also the part of the process where you start narrowing in on key features for your newsletter, like the content you should include, the format, or tone. Below, see an example Faye shared from the same Fishtown survey mentioned above. They learned that construction news and updates are of most interest to their readers and decided to prioritize that information for their newsletter.
Again, not everyone has the time and resources to conduct and evaluate a separate survey of potential or current newsletter subscribers. So if you find yourself in that position, see below for a few tricks to get through this evaluate stage. One of the best tips is deciding to just focus on your superfans, or the folks who might already be opening your newsletter every day or week. Who are these people?! What do they want?
Below are some tips on how to make the Evaluate stage a bit more manageable. You’ll see that similarly to the Explore phase, we recommend a short survey. A survey here isn’t a prerequisite for getting started, but if you have to prioritize your survey resources, we’d recommend focusing on this stage over the Explore phase.
ITERATE AND LAUNCH: This is our favorite part of the process, because it means you’ve made it to the fun part — actually getting a newsletter out the door, and now trying to improve it. Newsletterer Delia Cai exemplified this stage when she added a classifieds section into her Deez Links newsletter once she noticed that her friends and target audience wanted more information on who’s hiring in media and journalism. (See our blog post about Delia Cai’s Deez Links newsletter for more on that). The Philadelphia Inquirer exemplified this stage with their COVID newsletter, a product they launched in March 2019 and later adapted as the pandemic went on and the preferences and information needs of audiences changed, adding more organized content blocks and advertising.
Another example we like: local nonprofit newsroom VTDigger wanted to learn about why some email readers were unsubscribing, so they set up the form on the left to appear once someone unsubscribed. The form is a one-question survey that helped them see that a good portion of unsubscribers were readers who lived in Vermont only in the summer and then tired of newsletter updates come the fall. In the end, VTDigger decided not to focus on serving this audience segment of VT-summer-people, so no action was required after discovering this learning.
Here are some quick and scrappy tips that summarize what we liked from all of the examples above:
If you’ve made it this far, you’re likely a newsletter wizard too, so send us a note at newsletterwizards@gmail.com with any feedback, reactions, or even if you just want to say hello. If you want more on audience research processes and best practices (but applied to membership programs instead of newsletters), check out the Audience Research chapter in the Membership Puzzle Project’s Membership Guide. And drop us your email address here if you’d like to stay in the loop with our forthcoming newsletter product!
