Newsletter Strategy Is Content Strategy

It's no secret that media has evolved dramatically over the past 10 to 15 years. At the beginning of the consumer internet, we had desktops and destinations: I worked at Yahoo in 2010, and we were selling the homepage for hundreds of thousands of dollars every day because hundreds of millions of people went to Yahoo.com. For the companies that came next—the “old guard of new media,” companies like Thrillist, Vox and Complex—once they started to gain traction and scale, they had to pivot away from this strategy. With their success came an abundance of content that could no longer be housed on a dot com destination. It had to be distributed wherever consumers were, which meant a huge shift to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of a new content homepage—not a dot com and not a social platform, but an inbox. And with that, the (re)birth of the newsletter as an incredibly valuable content marketing and advertising medium began. It is far from new, but the product, when done right, looks remarkably different today. It represents a new kind of content destination and distribution, all wrapped up in one-to-one, personalized delivery, right to your mailbox when you want it and need it. As Newsletter Advertising Grows, Advertisers Opt for Quality Over Quantity Let’s take a step back. Email, and newsletters in particular, have been seen as a direct response channel for a long time—CTR or bust! Many brands and publishers still use them in this way (and do so quite effectively), and I get it. It works. You have a reader’s undivided attention. And with a limited amount of time and limited things to click on, you can guide that attention to very specific products, services and calls to action. But if you have someone’s full attention, their trust and their permission to show up in their personal space every day, there should be more value available to capture. We’ve found that 92% of Morning Brew readers consider us a part of their daily ritual—this type of attention, trust and habit is not just valuable, it’s invaluable. This is the thesis for the case that newsletters represent one of the best full- and upper-funnel marketing opportunities anywhere. And, it is the clearest indication that we must remember there is a difference between the medium (email) and the message (newsletter). Remember: The newsletter is content. You are reaching an engaged audience, a quantity of quality. You have this audience’s full attention. It’s not one big promotion or ad. Yes, it’s sponsored, and the ads are also great—they are all custom pieces of branded content in and of themselves. When every piece of branded content is created in-house, it guarantees the content will be as native and authentic as possible to the highly engaged audience. And when that happens, the advertising also performs for partners. Recent data from Kantar’s Norms database on the latest industry benchmarks support this statement from a content advertising perspective: On average, brands saw a 2.9% aided awareness lift, 3.1% message association lift, 2.1% brand favorability lift and a 1.8% purchase consideration/intent lift when leveraging branded content. When dealing with large reach numbers, these lifts represent serious and meaningful business results and outcomes. (It is worth noting that, when done right, results can reach two to four times industry averages.) My advice to fellow publishers would be to find ways to engage your audience in this kind of intimate, one-to-one way and build that habit and rapport. Newsletters aren't one-size-fits-all, but they can be an amazing option. Their opt-in nature means that your audience and community has already said, “Yes, I want your content.” That’s powerful and means organic reach. The TL;DR? Brands have an incredible opportunity in front of them. They can find publishers who have built a deep trust and relationship with their audiences and are providing value to the audience every day by way of creating and curating great content. And they can partner together to create content to live within that newsletter and benefit from the awareness, perception and consideration lifts that follow. The results may not be as immediate, but the brand benefits and consumer love will last. Business Newsletter Industry Dive Is on Pace to Break $100 Million in Revenue