As an audience engagement producer for the Columbia Missourian, I helped build and launch a newsletter targeting parents to help the paper reach new readers and build digital relationships. We also wanted to increase newsletter engagement within the Missourian’s readership.
The newsletter focused on coverage for parents, whether that be covering bills in the state legislature or K-12 education. We specifically chose to target this segment by looking at our audience analytics. We saw that stories in the K-12 education section ranked fourth within the local Columbia audience, meaning that there was interest in this topic, but there was also room to grow the audience.
To help inform the way the newsletter was structured, we used an audience survey that asked parents what mattered to them in coverage of Columbia Public Schools and the upcoming school board election. Through this survey, we found that parents cared about topics like teacher support and school safety.
We decided to have this newsletter come out monthly to ensure it would remain sustainable. The Missourian’s audience and education teams were small and rotated with a completely new staff every semester. We needed to make sure this was a product that could be produced by our small audience team.
Our first edition came out the day before the school board election and featured an interview with an education reporter. This helped contextualize some of the issues candidates were speaking on that mattered to our audience. Ahead of this launch, we created an organic social campaign to promote the new newsletter across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This edition had an open rate of 72.7% and a click rate of 22.7%. The initial list size was 25 ahead of the first edition.
04-03_Newsletter_SchoolBoardAfter the second edition, we noticed the list was not growing as quickly as we would like. We pivoted to running a paid Facebook Ads campaign to reach parents in the Columbia area who may not be already connected with the Missourian. Our newsletter list quadrupled after this campaign.
After focusing on elections in our first edition, our second edition looked at state legislative policy that could impact parents and students. The state legislative session was set to end in two weeks after this newsletter came out. There were many bills that had not passed yet, including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prevent public school teachers from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation.
05-01-StateLegislatureFinally, after speaking with parents who subscribed to the newsletter, many said they wanted to find events where they could take their kids during the summer while school was not in session. The next month, we added this section to the newsletter and curated events around the Columbia area.
CPD-Newsletter-3-0623Measuring success through KPIs
The Missourian generated strong revenue from print subscriptions, but were looking to create more digital products to expand their online presence. Its existing newsletters were auto-generated headlines from the home page. Reading the existing newsletters was often very similar to just visiting their home page. The open rate and click rates for these newsletters were also low — around 4%.
The goal of this newsletter was to create an engaging, curated experience for a targeted segment of Missourian readers. We were focused on providing helpful information to our readers, and less focused on driving traffic to articles. For this reason, we sought to improve our open rate to 25% on this newsletter.
The first edition of the newsletter had an open rate of 72.7%, and the second edition had an open rate of 68.4%.