Over 50% of your subscribers don't engage past the first two stories

Gold Lasso conducted an email engagement study with 32 publishers that send one column newsletters.  Our findings concluded that the majority of newsletter clicks happens on the first two stories, with almost half going to the top story.  This interesting statistic repudiates the idea of "the more content the better," and should encourage publishers to shorten their email communications.  

In my last post we talked about the D.A.R.T. framework used to mold subscriber’s engagement. Although Design, as discussed, is the heaviest variable in training your subscriber’s to engage, the three other pieces of the puzzle are crucial as well. 

 Next up, we’ve got Amount. The actual term I’d like to use here would be cadence, but that wouldn’t make for the cool D.A.R.T. acronym. By cadence I mean the flow and balance of just the right amount of content, ads, images, and links. To make the most of your email monetization efforts, you need the perfect mix of all these things. It’s a tough nut to crack.

Let’s start with the Engagement Waterfall. Since an email newsletter is very similar to search results and social streams, it follows a similar engagement pattern.

85.39 percent of a newsletters engagement in the study occurred with content while the remainder went to advertisements and ancillary links. 

Engagement with ads followed a similar distribution to content however the promo banner at the top received 0.5% to 0.8% of the clicks while the native ads within the stream received 5.34% to 8.83% of the total unique clicks. 

Engagement Waterfall

Since email is a captive audience and ads used in email are non intrusive (no Javascript, video or audio), engagement is generally high for both content and ads. If you’ve got 10 or more stories in your newsletter, you can go up to a 50/50 ad to content ratio without denigrating the subscriber experience.

Most publishers nurture their audience with daily email sending. Daily sending, including weekends, is a must to continue to build and maintain a quality, engaged audience. A lot of publishers choose to send multiple times a day. If the publisher produces content for more than one topic, multiple times a day, with multiple pieces of content for each, it is recommended to send 2 times daily. 

Bottom line is, you never let an opportunity to get in front of your subscribers go to waste. Breaking news alerts are also a great opportunity in every content frequency situation - whether you send once or twice daily. Gold Lasso developed a sending optimization chart (available in our playbook) to help with these sending decisions. 

The D.A.R.T. components, examples and recommendations are fully covered in Gold Lasso’s “The Email Monetization Playbook”. Click here to download this definitive guide for publishers -- offering more than 150 tips for optimizing email monetization with concrete examples, illustrations, and pitfalls to avoid.