Rethinking Subscriptions: Lessons Learned From Redesigning Email

A few months ago, I took on the task of evaluating and reinventing the blog email marketing subscription.

It 's not that our email subscription was not working. We were gaining an impressive number of subscribers every month. These subscribers that we open and click on our subscription emails - and we had the traffic numbers to prove it. But this information and these measurements have only scratched the surface when it comes to the health of our subscription.

Further analysis revealed that we were losing subscribers at about the same rate as we were gaining them - we had an unsubscribe issue. Et in some cases the cause of the abandonment had something to do with how often we sent these emails.

It was clear that we were leaving opportunities on the table when it came to subscriber longevity and engagement. And maybe more importantly, it was time to do something about it.

Explore our existing email subscription

Until recently, our email subscription was as follows:

• Step 1: Someone is signing up to receive a daily or weekly email from us.
• Step 2: Generate an RSS email of our latest content.
• Step 3: The subscriber receives the email.

Since we have never fiddled with the existing email subscription in the past, there was apparently endless possibility of how the new model could take shape. But before blazing a new path, I decided to dig through our emailscurrent and subscriber expectations to see what was going on. That meant crunching some numbers, as well as probing our unengaged subscribers to diagnose w that was exactly what kept them from finding value.

Here's what I found ...

3 takeaways from an analysis of our old subscription model

1 ) Our subscriber list was growing, but people were not sticking around.

At the time of my initial research, we were shrinking about 10% of our total subscriber list size each month. I'll dive into why people were likely to opt out in more detail below, but quite simply, our subscribers got off ship because their needs weren't being met.

When we took a closer look at how long exactly subscribers remained engaged with our subscription emails, we found:

• On average, 16% of new blog marketing subscribers opt out of their own accord before the six-month deadline.
• On average, blog marketing retains about 22% of new subscribers for six months or more.

What is the consequence here? Well, since we acquire a significant number of new subscribers every month, keeping them engaged for a longer period of time means:

• More traffic from new subscribers
• Better subscriber experience
• Better list health and deliverability
• More opportunities to convert subscribers to leads

At this point, there is everything we were missing.

2) Subscribers were overwhelmed by the number of emails they received.

Once the unsubscribe and engagement numbers were calculated, we decided to launch a survey of subscribers who were starting to lose interest in our subscriber.definitely. One of the major themes that emerged in their responses? Email overload.

In fact, 30% of survey respondents said the first thing they didn't like about our blogging experience was the number of emails they received . For more context, here are some of the raw responses we got:

• "Content is good, send it less often. "
• "I would really like it to be twice a week. Not every day, but not once a week either. A cadence of Monday, Wednesday, Friday would be nice. "
• "C 'was too much. "
• " Too frequent. Would gloss over them as spam. "

3) Subscribers didn't always think that the content was relevant to them.

The cool thing about running a blog that has been around for so many years is that some of our followers have been there from the start. They rose through the ranks thanks to ourre content and have become inbound marketers. But there are also our new subscribers - each with varying degrees of marketing experience and interest.

Did our existing email subscription meet everyone's needs? Not quite. Mainly because we send the exact same blog posts to our subscribers regardless of their content preferences.

Launching a new wave of subscriptions

By taking this as we learned from our old subscription, along with all the feedback gathered from our existing subscribers, we decided to design a new model.

We had two goals in mind:

1. Reduce the unsubscribe rate of subscribers
2. Improve the click-through rate

And we planned to achieve thesegoals by solving two problems:

1. Find a way to deliver a more personalized content experience. This issue has surfaced a lot in the feedback we have gathered from our existing subscribers. In order to keep people coming back for more, we needed to create a more personalized content experience.
2. Determine a more manageable messaging rate. People were overwhelmed. They couldn't keep up with every daily shipment and they wanted us to take breaks.

With these two fundamental challenges in mind, we landed on a twice-weekly newsletter series consisting of crazy goal-oriented editions:

• Get inspired. Exceptional marketing examples, design inspiration and revolutionary ideas that will keep you on your toes.
• Develop yourself. The tips, strategies and practical advice you need to master inbound marketing and achieve your growth goals.
• Get ahead. The latest in marketing and technology to keep you up to date and ahead of the curve.
• Get Better. Expert career and professional development advice designed to help you improve your skills, stay motivated and work smarter.

We also offer a "Get All of Them" option, where subscribers receive a newsletter containing the best of each edition.

How the new subscription works

Launched in early May, the new subscription was only rolled out to new subscribers - existing subscribers would still receive their sends every week as we test the new model. The goal was to get the new emails out to our entire subscriber base once we had a chance to test.

Here's how it went ...

1) Visitors opt-in through one of our subscription CTAs on the website and the blog.

2) New subscribers receive a welcome email once they sign up with a link to a subscription preferences page .

↓

3) Subscribers choose the newsletter that best matches their interests and needs.

For example, a person responsible for increasing attendance of his marque online can subscribe to the Get Growing newsletter. This edition offers marketing tips and advice on building and executing an evolving inbound strategy.

With change comes complications ...

Going into this experiment, I had a theory of what was going to happen. I had researched and thought a lot about the changes we were making.

But once I launched the new subscription, a few unexpected things happened. .

P people did not go to the newsletter lists all of this without a problem.

In fact, edition-specific subscriptions were growing very slowly - so much so that we decided to do not send content due to the small size of the lists.

It was clear that this compartmentalization process turned out to be more complicated than expected. The welcome email - which contains the link to the preferences landing page of 'subscription - had a 40% open rate, leaving 60% of people unaware that there were even personalized subscription options . And click-through data revealed that less than 5% of subscribers had visited the subscription preferences page to date.

The " Get All of Them "list was the only one to show significant growth.

Interestingly, people flocked to the list to all - exclusive newsletter - the one that contained a mix of content from each of the four trade editions. This is the only list that we started emailing.

To be honest, this was easier pWe ended up on the list for several reasons. On the one hand, we decided to automatically subscribe to people who chose not to customize their subscription to the Get All of Them option - these subscribers made up 36% of the full list.

We also automatically subscribed those who arrive via the inion checkbox on our lead generation forms to avoid sending them a bribe and welcome email in same time - these subscribers made up about 60% of the entire list.

This means that only the remaining 4% of subscribers on the total Get All of Them list voluntarily chose to receive this newsletter on the nces preferred landing page subscription.

What Gives?

We asked. They responded. We listened.

Still, it seemed that our solution to the custom content problem was missing the mark. Did people really want enough content personnisé to take the extra step? We weren't so sure - especially after looking at the numbers of the emails we sent.

The (first) numbers

Aside from the complications, we do have several weeks of Get All of Them shipments and discoveries to our credit. And to our surprise, the numbers are quite inconsistent - and a bit disappointing.

Click-through and open rate

After seven submissions, the average click-through rate for the Get All of Them newsletter drops to around 5.1% , w hile the last seven outings of the existing daily and weekly emails saw 5.3% and 6.7 click-through rates %, respectively.

As for the opening rate, the newau subscription email saw an average of 34% , while the last seven deliveries of the existing daily and weekly emails registered 40.37% and 24.84% respectively.

Remember: The click-through rate for the new email is a bit lower than its daily and weekly predecessors. This is probably due to the fact that this newsletter is organized very similarly to the old subscription, in that subscribers receive a mixed set of content on a variety of topics that may or may not be relevant to them. The open rate has dropped amid daily and weekly performance ormance, revealing that twice per week was a manageable rate, but maybe not the perfect fit.

Unsubscribe ratessubscribers

The good news? The churn rate was going down. The overall churn rate for twice-weekly subscribers during the month of May was 4.2% - over 5% off the churn rate for the old subscription last month.

Remember: This signals us that people are finding value in both updates per week - at least enough to stick around. If we can keep the unsubscribe rate low in this way, we will be able to reap the benefits of this. 'increased traffic and improved health from the list.

Preparing for V2: what needs to be changed?

So this experience was- Does she flop? Not really - and it 's not over. Although there have been a handful of blockers, the important thing here is that we learn something new by trying something different.

As we begin to think about how to resolve the challenges that arose during the V1 launch of this new subscription model, there are a few lessons we can apply to prepare ourselves. to succeed in V2.

1) The design must be tested.

Using the feedback I received via the feedback loop at the bottom of each email, I determined that the new design wasn 't ' ne not resonate with everyone. A few people suggested more visuals, while others noted that it was a bit long.

We plan to run A / B testing here to determine a format that inspires the best click-through rate.

(Got any ideas on how we can improve? Leave a comment - we'd love to hear them.)

2) The subscription preferences landing page creates friction.

We knew that asking subscribersNot having to register twice would not be easy. Asking people to perform an action in the welcome email was not ideal, but the dedicated landing page allowed the time and space to explain the editions in detail.

In the future, we may eliminate this page entirely and provide an option to personalize your subscription directly in the body of the email. This would eliminate the need for subscribers to click on the subscribe page and hopefully increase participation.

Another option? Rename newsletters to make them more meaningful and add them as options directly on the subscription CTA. This would eliminate missed the need for a welcome email and lowered the barrier to entry.

3) We need to increase the open rate.

The open rate for new mailings exceeds that of our existing weekly subscription, but does nots hit the Daily, proving it's hard to stay in your mind when people can't hear you every day.

To resolve this issue, we are already experimenting with different days of the week to determine the best possible time to send these emails. We are also exploring different subject line formats aimed at piquing interest and increasing openings.

Variant A

Variant B

Results: Variant A (with emojis) outperformed Variant B.

4) We need to find a way to introduce subscriber customizationements to checkbox subscribers.

A review of the first numbers revealed that almost 60% of our subscribers arrive via the checkbox on our lead generation forms. After a discussion with our marketers, we have chosen to automatically subscribe to these people to receive the Get All of Them newsletter, rather than sending them two emails.

On a larger scale, we're looking for ways to create smart, all-in-one return emails to send when a visitor takes an action that would typically result in multiple follow-up emails. - for example, download an offer and subscribe to the blog at the same time. This internal project would give us the opportunity to present our subscription newsletters to all new subscribers, including those converting on the subscriber's checkbox.

As a more immediate solution, we started adding a text snippet to the top of each e-mail that encourages people to visit the subscription preferences page if they want to receive more personalized content.

Try it, try again

It's sure to say the road to a better, more personalized email subscription hasn't been easy. There have been setbacks and curves, but above all, there has been progress. We look forward to continuing to iterate on our new model with the goal of creating an ema a subscription that people are looking forward to.

Want to experience the new subscription for yourself? Subscribe here and let us know what you think.