Growing Your Audience Pt. II
This week’s readings for my media and entrepreneurship class serve as a continuation of last week’s point of discussion: how to grow your subscriber base from 0 to 1,000 people. Prior to last week, I really had no idea how formulaic this could be, and I believe this week’s assigned readings helped me understand that even better.
I focused a large portion of my Medium post last week on the Morning Brew. Fittingly, the two first articles I read this week were focused on just that. The growth.design graphics helped point out effective ways the Morning Brew draws subscribers in and increases their readability and open rate, two concepts I had not considered quite as important as I did prior to this week. I enjoyed this resource because it aligned with the Morning Brew’s unconventional structure by simply featuring a number of illustrations that readers could click through to see what they were talking about.
They made it clear that this “article” was not sponsored by the Morning Brew, so I immediately threw any predeterminations of bias out the window. Two things in particular struck me. One interesting point was that the majority of people reading the Morning Brew are doing so first thing in the morning. Now, I speak for myself, as someone who has never been a morning person, but I get the sense that most people do not roll out of bed ready to break down graphs of stocks and read lengthy paragraphs with complex text. The article praises the Morning Brew for their catchy headlines, soft introductions and humanlike language. I think this makes a lot of sense, as the Morning Brew strives to be the millennials’ version of the Wall Street Journal.
I knew about the referral program, where subscribers can earn materialistic rewards for bringing others into the Morning Brew community. I think this is a good idea, but since I had read about it last week it didn’t quite stand out to me as some other parts of the article. What stood out to me was how the author actually critiqued the Morning Brew over their stocks graphics and urged them to make this customizable for subscribers. I think it was cool how they later included that their number 1 source of feedback from subscribers was to indeed make these portions of their newsletter customizable, since of course not everyone will be invested in the same five stocks they discuss every day.
I found the next article of the Morning Brew to be of great interest because it was written by Jenny Rothenberg, the Director of Growth at the Morning Brew. I enjoyed what she had to say because I knew the information she wrote about was coming directly from a reputable source. This is not to say that they people who wrote the information graphics in the previous article are not reputable — in fact I think they are — but they are not exactly on the “inside” of the operation the way Rotherberg is, and she had a lot to say. One thing that stood out to me was when she discussed how the Morning Brew prioritizes their open rate over their total subscriber count.
They do this by automatically removing anyone who has not opened an article in the 18 days since joining the subscriber list (and ignoring their warning email before being removed) or those who have not opened an article in 90 days for other reasons (such as switching email addresses or providing them with an incorrect email). At first I scratched my head at this concept as my classmates and I would be thrilled to get just 100 subscribers, so to simply remove someone for not engaging with your content seemed illogical. However, after further consideration and reflection I realized that what the Morning Brew cares most about is having an audience that will consistently be engaged with their work and that’s how you create a loyal following.
I think something that tied back into the first article’s point of the Morning Brew’s ability to draw readers through soft introductions, intriguing headlines and humanlike language are the points discussed in Nidhriti Bhowmik’s article on Search Engine Optimization and how she got her blog posts to regularly rank on Google. She stresses the importance of creating headlines that will draw readers in and speaking in language (in the introduction before any bullet points come into the picture) that anyone can comprehend, and I thought it was interesting how those core values aligned with aspects of the Morning Brew that were praised in the growth.design article.
Overall, I enjoyed the readings this week, as I think they helped add another layer to my thinking of how to grow a subscriber base, and in particular with the Morning Brew.
