Success doesn’t have to be a million new subscribers. Sometimes it’s just a few thousand.

As a youth media outlet, The Daily Vox’s biggest audiences have always been on its social media channels, with an on-again-off-again newsletter reaching to an audience in the low thousands.

But after re-launching its weekly newsletter in 2020, in just a few months The Daily Vox tripled that email audience – not due to any big editorial shift or major news event, but simply by carefully implementing some of the basic ‘best practices’ of newsletter publishing.

Speaking at a recent SAMIP event, The Daily Vox’s Fatima Moosa and Des Brown from email service provider Touchbase Pro shared the strategies that helped them grow, and re-engage, their newsletter audience.

Why email matters

The Reuters Institute’s 2020 Digital News Report called it “the resurgence” of email newsletters.

“Once thought of as low-tech and unfashionable,” writes Reuter Institute’s Nic Newman, newsletters “are proving increasingly valuable to publishers looking to build strong direct relationships with audiences.”

This may be especially true for South African publishers: of 40 countries surveyed in the report, South Africans were among the top users of email as a news source, second only to the Belgians.

The Daily Vox relaunched its weekly newsletter during South Africa’s first Covid-19 lockdown – initially, to relatively low engagement and little growth. But with a few iterative changes, these metrics started to improve. Within months, the newsletter audience had nearly tripled, from fewer than 2000 subscribers in July 2020 to over 6000 by February 2021, and reader engagement climbed as well.

A few thousand new subscribers are no big deal for industry giants, but for many newsletter publishers working from a low base, it’s exactly the break they need.

What’s noteworthy is that the strategies behind that growth are within reach for almost anyone publishing a newsletter:

1. Pop-up forms work (sometimes)

Readers can only subscribe to a newsletter when they know there is a newsletter. It may sound obvious, but Fatima says the single biggest driver of new subscriptions was a simple pop-up form on the website, to complement its regular static signup page, driving visitors from their social pages to sign up for the newsletter as well. Daily Vox also ran subscription campaigns on social media to tap into their large audiences on Twitter and Facebook.

But pop-ups should be used with caution. Last year, newsletter guru Dan Oshinsky ran a masterclass for SAMIP participants on the many shapes and sizes for newsletter sign-up forms. In 25 Ways to Sign Someone Up For Your Newsletter, Dan says: “Pop-ups are one of the most effective units for capturing email sign-ups. But deployed incorrectly, they can also be one of the most annoying for readers.”

2. Make it personal

The Daily Vox has always thrived by creating strong ties with its youth audience. Fatima drafted the newsletter as a personal reflection on the news of the day, from her to the reader. Where the reader had provided their name, they got a “Dear [Name]” personalised greeting. As the pandemic wore on, Fatima would ask her readers how they were managing, and many replied.

The Daily Vox also added a few automated steps to onboard new readers, including a welcome email for those signing up, and a follow-up message a few days later to invite the reader to specify what kinds of stories they are interested in. This information can be used to segment your audience by interest, so that you can send more targeted content to your audience.

3. Adjust the look and feel

While some newsletter readers may prefer text-first newsletters with a minimalist design, Des Brown, from Touchbase Pro, says The Daily Vox’s readers responded to a more visual format.

The revamped newsletter format makes use of strong images to break up each section, keeps the copy short and to-the-point: long, unbroken blocks of text can be off-putting to readers. Images link out to the accompanying articles, to make it as easy as possible for the reader to click through. As Des says: “People buy with their eyes.”

The lesson: Experiment with the layout and design of the newsletter, to test its impact on readers’ engagement, and to make sure the look and feel is just right.

4. Re-engage or remove non-openers

“Having a large number of subscribers may look impressive, but there’s no point if a number of those are not reading your newsletter,” says Des. While trimming down on dormant or disengaged users is a common ‘best practice’ for newsletter publishers, it’s a bit of housekeeping that many newsrooms don’t get to.

Working with Touchbase Pro, The Daily Vox scheduled an occasional re-engagement email for those who appeared not to be opening the newsletter, asking if they would like to stay on the mailing list or be removed. Those readers who opt out or who don’t respond at all are removed from The Daily Vox’s distribution list.

5. Know your analytics

Knowing which analytics matter, and why, is key to growing your newsletter. Des says statistics were behind the gradual improvements and tweaks The Daily Vox made to its newsletter.

For example: very early on, Fatima saw a sharp increase in open rates when readers were addressed by name.

While each newsletter strategy has its own specific metrics for success, the indicators that mattered most to The Daily Vox’s newsletter: open rates (one way to measure its progress in engaging new readers and re-engaging old ones), click rates (which gave insight on what kinds of stories mattered to readers, and which tweaks to the style and layout were most effective for readers), and unsubscribe rates (which helped measure whether new subscribers liked the newsletter enough to stay).

• Read: Six email metrics that matter (that aren’t open rates)

6. Content is king queen

Whatever marketing and onboarding steps used to grow a newsletter, ultimately, readers will reward you for quality content. The Daily Vox saw a sharp increase in subscriptions in January 2020, just before the start of the academic year, after publishing a series of stories and explainers for incoming students and school learners. Moosa said this uptick in subscribers tracked an increase in web traffic, which led to more potential subscribers being exposed to the sign-up pop-up on the website.

“It’s a combination of the content, and the analytics doing really well,” Moosa said, proving that there’s no substitute for quality content that is meaningful to your audience.

Some of our favourite newsletter resources:

• Not a Newsletter – a monthly newsletter resource pack
• Newsletter Guide.org – a standalone manual for newsletter publishing

Speaking of newsletters… sign up for SAMIP’s monthly updates on the latest media innovations in our cohort:

The South African Media and Innovation Program (SAMIP) recently hosted a webinar on using WhatsApp for publishing, where three innovative WhatsApp projects showcased their work.

Some of the early iterations of @thecontinent_ show how the publication evolved into the product that's being distributed today pic.twitter.com/nPKQR4a4em

— SA Media Innovation (@SAMIP_MDIF) May 21, 2020

• Gustav Praekelt, founder of Turn, presented on the COVID-19 HealthAlert service, a WhatsApp-based information helpline that was piloted by South Africa’s Department of Health in March 2020. The platform is now used by the World Health Organisation and several other national governments, with over 20 million users worldwide.
• Paul McNally of Volume and Africa Check’s Kate Wilkinson presented on the distribution of What’s Crap on WhatsApp, a fact-checking podcast that’s packaged for mass distribution on WhatsApp. (Each episode is a 5-minute voice note, broadcast to nearly 5000 users over WhatsApp.)
• Simon Allison and Kiri Rupiah of the Mail & Guardian showcased their experimental publishing of The Continent, a new weekly newspaper that packages high-quality reporting from across Africa into a format that is easy to read and share over mobile phones. (Inspired by Zimbabwe’s 263Chat, it’s designed to look like a high-quality broadsheet, but laid out on a PDF the size of a folded postcard. Every article is trimmed to about 250 words.)

Here are a few key takeaways from the discussion.

It doesn’t have to cost you (but you get what you pay for)

Gustav unveiled two main options for most businesses – WhatsApp SMB (WhatsApp for Business), a free option that is limited to businesses with fewer than 5000 users, and WhatsApp Business API, a premium option with a starting cost of about $200 per month – with potentially unlimited audience sizes.

In just a few short weeks, Turn’s HealthAlert app – built on the premium WhatsApp Business Api – garnered over 7 million users in South Africa.

By contrast, the What’s Crap team maintains a community of nearly 5000 subscribers using the free WhatsApp for Business app. Every subscriber is added manually to a set of broadcast lists (with a built-in limit of 256 members per list); each subscriber must also add the What’s Crap account number to their contacts in order to receive messages sent via broadcast list.

Automation isn’t for everyone

The principal benefit of WhatsApp Business API, other than its unlimited audience size, is automation. Turn’s HealthAlert service is being used by the World Health Organisation with 10 million users – Gustav estimates that this audience is being supported by about 10 people. However,  bots can’t do everything.  “If you have a model where you really need to support people, you should have one human operator for at least 1000 of your end users,” he says.

Certainly, the manual option requires some manual labour.

Kate says Africa Check had to hire extra help to maintain What’s Crap’s subscriber database during lockdown. Every time a broadcast message goes out, a human operator needs to scroll through the list of contacts to look for the classic ‘single tick’ sign of non-delivery – and engage that user to ask them to add What’s Crap’s number to their contact list.

Though What’s Crap is reaching the 5000-user limit for its WhatsApp for Business account, Kate says they are unlikely to migrate to the WhatsApp Business API: the main limit of the platform, aside from cost, is that it does not allow for broadcast – which is the very purpose of the project.

Make it personal

“WhatsApp is a very personal communication mechanism,” says Gustav. “Broadcast can be conceived of as being spamming, whereas one-on-one interactions can work very well.”

The personal touch is one reason why the small M&G team behind the Continent team has opted for an even more manual form of distribution. Every edition is sent out to WhatsApp users individually, one at a time. (Users can also subscribe via email or download the edition from mg.co.za/thecontinent, and Kiri also sends editions to a few discerning users over Signal.)

This is in part to avoid WhatsApp’s very sensitive block rates (“Not even 1%; 0.01% blockrates can get you flagged,” says Gustav).

The What’s Crap team also relies on personalised interactions with their users as a basic part of their project. Users are encouraged to submit dodgy messages and media that are circulating on WhatsApp, giving Africa Check’s fact-checkers a unique insight into what kind of disinformation is circulating in private, encrypted networks.

“Lots of people discuss WhatsApp as a distribution mechanism, where you’re sending content out, but we also use it as a way to gather information,” says Kate.

Get creative to measure engagement

While the hefty pricetag of a WhatsApp Business API platform comes with detailed analytics and audience insights, users of the no-cost options have to make do without. What’s more, WhatsApp’s content encryption means that publishers have very little insight to what happens to their message once it’s out in the wild: there is little way of knowing how many people share it, and with whom.

The What’s Crap team tries to get audience feedback by sending simple questions out to users. Users were asked to rate the latest episode on a simple emoji scale: thumbs up, thumbs down, heart, or poop. It was mainly thumbs ups and hearts, says Kate.

For The Continent, Kiri says they have built one sneaky engagement feature into the newspaper itself: a news quiz, buried on page 19 of the paper.

“The quiz is not just a brain teaser. The quiz is to see how far into the content people are going,” she says. You won’t find the answers to this week’s quiz in next week’s edition – the only way to get the answers is to send a request, via WhatsApp, to The Continent’s account.

Clearly, whatever they’re doing is working. In just four weeks the mobile-first newspaper has garnered thousands of subscribers across Africa.

Subscribe to each of these innovative projects on WhatsApp:

• HealthAlert: https://wa.me/27600123456?text=Hi
• What’s Crap on WhatsApp: http://bit.ly/WhatsCrap
• The Continent: https://wa.me/27738056068