Vibe visionaries - Email was once again our #1 traffic source in April, accounting for 58% of visits to our sites last month. Three cities did an especially impressive job of growing their email traffic from the previous 30 days: DoNYC (↑20%), Do250 (↑41%), and Do604 (↑60%). For today's content directive, we asked each city to share what's working for them. Here's what they had to say: //// DoNYC: Here's one tip from each of us: Zack Filkoff, Content Manager Keep close watch on your previous emails to inform your current decisions. Do you get the best results when you post an NYC Delivery Guide, or Best Delivery in NYC? Are your yoga streams thriving while your comedy streams flop? If you are making a decision about what to feature or invest time in and can check past performance to inform your decision, make sure you do so! Jesse Soll, Brand Manager After you account for any required email content, look at your subject line, and figure out how you're going to fill that first, and how you fill the rest of the email second. The best article or stream in the world isn't going to get a ton of clicks if it isn't getting your email opened. Here are some safe bets for driving opens besides big artists: 1) News updates (by far the biggest factor for us). No stats, no curves, just policies that affect people day to day like openings, closings, fines, order extensions and other policies that impact personal behavior and apply to everyone. 2) Best X or Top 10 X 3) Free X If you can get one of those in every day, you'll raise your floor for email performance. It also helps us plan short term content knowing where we think we'll need to fill the gap in the next subject or two. If you don't have any of the above, get clever! We've seen solid open rates to a number of lighter news pieces like "Parks & Rec Reunion" and "IKEA Meatball Recipe", but don't just fill it up with artist names most people don't know. Jonny Pepperman, Account Manager Keep updating and sharing relevant content! We share our COVID-19 Updates page about every other day, and our Job Opps page every Thursday with new postings. Together, they account for over 20% of all of our site traffic. For Covid Updates, even a minor announcement is a shoe in for several hundred pvs from email. Most days this block delivers over 1,000 pvs; With substantial updates, the page consistently delivers 2,000+ clicks, getting as high as 4,198. The Job Opps page is not only a big traffic driver, it's something that's actually really useful to our audience! The fact that the block lands an average of 3,165 pageviews is just a nice perk, haha. ////// Do250 (via Victoria Manager, Dave Evans): Something we have been focusing on over here in BC is personalizing the brand by injecting our own identities / voices. This has been accomplished by:
///////// Do604 (via Content Manager, Ester Tothova): Everything Dave said and:
I think what definitely works the most is getting more personal - with the notes in the email, getting people to reach out directly to me (as opposed to the general do604 email) if they have any questions, letting our subscribers know that we are here for them and we only have positive "news" in our newsletters. The amount of thank you notes and positive feedback from businesses and subscribers in the past two months has been so heartwarming. |
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