More newspapers are offering their readers e-mail newsletters based on their interests and turning those subscriber lists into a cash stream
Kurt Greenbaum is Online News Director for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He can be reached at kgreenbaum@post-dispatch.com.
IN THE QUEST FOR ONLINE READERS AND REVENUE, some news companies are turning to an old technology for opportunity. Well, old in Internet terms: They’re turning to e-mail.
News organizations such as The Arizona Republic’s azcentral.com have launched dozens of newsletters. The Boston Globe’s boston.com has 10 newsletters, some with subscriber lists of 70,000 to 100,000 readers.
“We’ve doubled our e-mail revenue in the past year,” said Chris Murdough, who is in charge of audience management and analytics for boston.com, although he won’t divulge the bottom-line number. The site’s newsletters range from news-driven e-mails on the Red Sox and business news to ad-driven e-mails on movies and shopping.
In Phoenix, azcentral.com has more than 376,000 readers who subscribe to one or more of the 52 e-mail newsletters they promote on the site. Want parenting information? Celebrity news? Weekly updates from your community? They’ve probably got an e-mail for you, and more than half of them are generated automatically through the site’s content management system.
“We’re looking for all visitors, new and existing,” said John Leach, managing editor/news and digital media for azcentral.com. And what they really want, Leach says, is those e-mail addresses – lots of them. The money, he says, isn’t in selling advertisements in the newsletters. It’s in building a database of subscribers who are willing to receive offers from sponsors.
The model for Leach and Murdough is similar. Readers sign up for any of the stable of e-mail newsletters offered on the site. In the process, they’re asked if they’d be willing to receive special offers from advertisers. Meanwhile, they’re also invited to get specialized advertiser-driven e-mails. Both sites offer travel-related e-mails, for example. Neither sends one on a regular schedule. The travel e-mails go out only when an advertiser has a deal to promote.
Meanwhile, both offer what might be called “loss leaders.” These are e-mail newsletters that don’t have any direct revenue attached to them, but invite readers for the content. And that gives readers another chance to subscribe for the revenue-generating newsletters.
Not every news site finds raving revenue success with their newsletters. Alison Scholly, general manager for Chicago Tribune Interactive, has closed down some newsletters and discouraged launching new ones “unless it’s a bona fide slam-dunk with audiences.” A newsletter for concert ticket information, for example, fell in that category.
Tim D’Avis, online director at the Quad-City Times, Davenport, Iowa, says he’s got a ways to go before he sees a payoff from e-mail newsletters. It all depends on the size of the e-mail list.
“We’re going to have to grow that before traffic or revenue become a reality,” D’Avis said. “E-mail distribution is part of the same strategy as RSS, video, widgets and partnerships; getting your news and advertising in front of people on their terms instead of ours.”
Leach agrees with the idea of growing the database.
He says one key for azcentral is offering a huge variety and automating much of the work so work is kept to a minimum. Some of his site’s newsletters have as few as 850 subscribers. The largest is the breaking news newsletter with 33,000 subscribers. And remember those 376,000 subscribers to all of his newsletters? Thirty-four percent of them have said they’re willing to receive advertiser’s messages by e-mail.
And that’s a database of subscribers that provided information in the registration process, so it can be sliced and diced by age, geography and gender. Seventy percent of his subscribers, for example, are women, an audience advertisers often find attractive.
Azcentral.com carefully manages its commercial e-mails, so an individual subscriber does not receive more than one commercial e-mail each day.
“You clearly don’t want to overwhelm people who invite you into their e-mail box,” Leach said. “There are limits to it, which I think is smart.” *