The From Line

Written for Publishing Executive by Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso CEO 

Melody Kramer’s recent piece, “When newsrooms don’t own their data, other companies profit” on Poynter should be a hard and fast wake-up call for publishers. Kramer, a former digital strategist at NPR and former visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, offers several insights from publishers about how newsrooms collect then give away data programmatically without fair compensation. Most of the examples she provides are related to behavioral data, however “data fleecing” publishers stretches way beyond link tracking and location check-ins.

The Publisher

Spanfeller Media Group (SMG) is a fast growth media company, headed up by Jim Spanfeller, former CEO of Forbes. The Daily Meal (TDM) was the first site launched by SMG in the early months of 2011. Since then it has proven to be one of the fastest growing content sites ever and the fastest growing site within the food sphere.

The Situation

As an online publisher that is constantly producing content for distribution, The Daily Meal was manually compiling newsletters several times per day to distribute to their subscribers. This was time-consuming, resource intensive, and the furthest thing from automated. There was also no monetization effort in place which left TDM feeling like they were leaving money on the table every single day. Jim Spanfeller created an in-house solution--he assembled two teams: one team to search for automation options for their daily email distribution, and another team to look into monetization opportunities. Little did he know that they could find solutions to both at Gold Lasso. 

According to to Litmus “Email Analytics”, 55% of all email is opened on mobile devices. It’s time for publishers to face the fact that information is being consumed more on the go, and email that is not designed for the mobile world first is doomed for failure.

User Experience
It’s all about the user experience. Understanding what is pleasing to the eye and attention-grabbing to subscribers is vital. There is a lot to be learned from the layout of the email design and how it is interpreted -- to ensure a second glance and not an immediate dump into the trash.

For starters, it’s imperative to create a responsive design that will optimize viewer traffic. We’re all familiar with responsive web design, and email is no stranger to this veneer. The methods to generate responsive email design are practically scientific. A effortless change of the font size, layout, adding padding, modifying color, navigation, scaling of images, hierarchy, and alteration of content can make all the difference. 

As publishers, we’re obsessed with content relevance. However, with audience fragmentation it has become quite the challenge to remain relevant since multiple audiences often exist on a publisher’s list. Although there’s  a lot of interest overlap, it’s difficult to hold the interest of an entire audience without losing the attention of a few.

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.