Challenge

Online publishers are constantly facing the challenge of competing for website traffic — often relying on a large, active, and engaged email list to deliver traffic to their site.

One conservative online news organization was seeing a fair amount of traffic to their articles but few signups for their daily newsletter. They hired Campaign Inbox to grow their email list and ultimately deliver more traffic to their site daily.

Our mission was to turn their website readers into newsletter subscribers and drive engagement with their news content, and we took 3 steps to do so:

1. Create and optimize organic email opt-in opportunities across its website
2. Increase open and engagement rates
3. Decrease unsubscribe rate

We worked with the publisher to grow its email list, increase engagement, and expand its email newsletter offerings.

Results

  • Grew the email list organically by 61% in 9 months
  • Increased revenue stream by adding over $500,000 value in new email addresses
  • Increased open rates by 92%

Discovering and Opting-In New Email Subscribers

To capture organic email sign-ups, we needed to create email opt-in opportunities that would catch the attention of site readers and convert them to sign up to receive emails.

First, we optimized the email signup boxes on the website by redesigning and optimizing the language and design of signup boxes.

Then, we utilized exit-intent pop-ups across the website that would convert users to submit their email address in exchange for receiving the content they want directly to their inbox.

Finally, we continued to create opt-in boxes and organic opt-in opportunities across the website based around newsworthy topics and events that were attracting new and non-recurring users to the site. These users were critical to the growth of the email list, as this was how we captured the users who were not daily readers and therefore were not likely to be already on the email list.

Keeping Subscribers Engaged, Interested, and Coming Back for More Clicks

Once we acquired new subscribers, we focused on sending content that was relevant to users and would keep them engaged, and allowing users to choose which content they wanted to receive.

For subscribers who opted in to receive issue-based content, we sent a newsletter with topical content written exclusively for newsletter subscribers.

We reorganized the unsubscribe structure for this client, allowing subscribers to choose which content to opt-out of in the future. For example, a subscriber could choose to receive daily newsletter content but stop receiving sponsored emails. This helped to keep overall unsubscribes, complaints, and un-engagement low — all of which contribute to high deliverability and in the end, more users visiting the publisher’s website daily.