Hey! I’m the current staff-member working on the EA Newsletter—and I’m currently working on the EA Newsletter improvement project we didn’t have time for before. So far this has been:
Making the EA Newsletter sign-up box more prominent in a few places (EA.org and CEA.org) + adding a link to the EA reddit side-panel (surprisingly big community).
Making the sign-up flow single-opt-in.
Designing better metrics to track impact and growth.
Re-writing the intro email campaign people get when they sign up and A/B testing it—this started recently so no new findings yet, but we should have info to improve it at the end of the month.
The next step is more seriously thinking about marketing, considering advertising it, integrating it more with other CEA touchpoints etc… Stay tuned.
Also, I always welcome any suggestions for low-hanging fruit in Newsletter marketing (I’m sure there is a lot of this), as well as general feedback on the Newsletter itself.
Thanks for the reply Toby! These seem like great steps to be taking, and I’m glad they’re in the works.
Since you ask about suggestions, here are some other things I’d be looking at if I were in your shoes.
Working with campus groups to solicit subscriptions. Organizers at Middlebury, a very small school, just reported creating 80 GWWC trial pledges through tabling. Presumably they could garner much higher numbers if they were asking for subscriptions rather than donations.
The total subscriber count has been falling since FTX. I suggest digging into the data on unsubscribers to learn more about this cohort. When did they subscribe? Were they previously engaging with the newsletter or does it look like people just unsubscribing from something they never looked at in the first place? I think this could provide a valuable data point regarding community retention/attrition, and I hope other projects (e.g. the forum team) would undergo a similar exercise.
There are currently ~60k subscribers, and approximately half of them joined in the short window between June 2016 and February 2017. This was obviously a period of aggressive outreach for the newsletter. The obvious question is: was it worthwhile? Presumably a lot of these folks never engaged with the newsletter or unsubscribed. But if a decent percentage of people who subscribed as a result of the more aggressive marketing went on to behave similarly to “normal” subscribers, that has big implications for the newsletter and other EA outreach activities.
Hey! I’m the current staff-member working on the EA Newsletter—and I’m currently working on the EA Newsletter improvement project we didn’t have time for before. So far this has been:
Making the EA Newsletter sign-up box more prominent in a few places (EA.org and CEA.org) + adding a link to the EA reddit side-panel (surprisingly big community).
Making the sign-up flow single-opt-in.
Designing better metrics to track impact and growth.
Re-writing the intro email campaign people get when they sign up and A/B testing it—this started recently so no new findings yet, but we should have info to improve it at the end of the month.
The next step is more seriously thinking about marketing, considering advertising it, integrating it more with other CEA touchpoints etc… Stay tuned.
Also, I always welcome any suggestions for low-hanging fruit in Newsletter marketing (I’m sure there is a lot of this), as well as general feedback on the Newsletter itself.
Thanks for the reply Toby! These seem like great steps to be taking, and I’m glad they’re in the works.
Since you ask about suggestions, here are some other things I’d be looking at if I were in your shoes.
Working with campus groups to solicit subscriptions. Organizers at Middlebury, a very small school, just reported creating 80 GWWC trial pledges through tabling. Presumably they could garner much higher numbers if they were asking for subscriptions rather than donations.
The total subscriber count has been falling since FTX. I suggest digging into the data on unsubscribers to learn more about this cohort. When did they subscribe? Were they previously engaging with the newsletter or does it look like people just unsubscribing from something they never looked at in the first place? I think this could provide a valuable data point regarding community retention/attrition, and I hope other projects (e.g. the forum team) would undergo a similar exercise.
There are currently ~60k subscribers, and approximately half of them joined in the short window between June 2016 and February 2017. This was obviously a period of aggressive outreach for the newsletter. The obvious question is: was it worthwhile? Presumably a lot of these folks never engaged with the newsletter or unsubscribed. But if a decent percentage of people who subscribed as a result of the more aggressive marketing went on to behave similarly to “normal” subscribers, that has big implications for the newsletter and other EA outreach activities.