Tag: email capture rate

How to turn six email analytics metrics into a big picture about the performance and plans for digitally marketing your publication

At Mequoda, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s not the traffic that comes to your site, which is the prevailing view among folks in all industries who jumped on the bandwagon early. Back in those days, it was all about impressions! Eyeballs on your page! After all, if they show up on your website, they’re bound to subscribe to your magazine, right?

Wrong.

Five steps to increase your email capture rate starting today
Converting website visitors into email subscribers is a key metric driver of your membership website. At Mequoda, we currently operate more than a dozen membership marketing systems in partnership with some of the country’s leading content brands including Harvard University, Hearst Magazines and Yankee Publishing.

Testing website conversion

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You don’t get from point A to point B without goals and milestones. This applies to most situations in life, from a cross-country road trip, to training for a marathon, to a career in publishing.

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains the four most important goals a publisher should hold close to their heart, in order to thrive as a multiplatform subscription publisher.

“Frugality includes all the other virtues.”

Old Cicero certainly knew what he was talking about. That’s why I wanted to remind you that your chance to exercise frugality in attending our Multiplatform Publishing Strategy program ends at midnight this Thursday, March 31. You’ll save $200.

Your email capture rate (ECR) is calculated by dividing the number of new email subscribers your website captures each month, by the number of unique new visitors passing through your website in a 30 day period. Your goal is to capture email contact permission from your website visitors by making generous offers that include free incentives.

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Our top-read audience development posts of 2017 give valuable insight into email and copywriting best practice methods.
We’ve put together our most-read audience development posts from 2017 on the Mequoda Daily. These posts included advice on how to design and send better email newsletters and how to improve your social media optimization skills for better audience

Consistent channel conversion zone architecture (3c), when applied to a publishing website, is a fancy way of saying that every channel (or portal topic) consistently aligns with a product that converts the user into a subscriber or paid user of your website. Together, they create what we call a zone. Using this zone to increase website to email conversion rates can be easy, if you let it. This metric is called your email capture rate.

Your floater, also referred to as a pop-up is most likely the most effective conversion element on your website. For most publishers we know who have floaters, they see 60% of email captures come through this element. And for those who launch them, they see a 20-50% lift in email capture rates right away.

As a publisher, you should make your website’s top goal to maximize your TOPX (Total Orders Per Ten Thousand) page views by making sure that every page on your website is ready to convert visitors into buyers and subscribers at any moment and increase publishing revenue.

Your Portal is the main page where you give away free articles and content. For many magazines, this is on their main domain, like TIME.com or People.com. If you’ve been following along with Mequoda you know that we advocate for every page on your Portal to have a set of best practice conversion architecture we call 3C Zone Architecture.

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It’s hard to determine how to spend both your time, and your resources within a business. The way we look at every decision you make is this:

Is whatever you’re thinking about doing, going to help you build an audience, improve capture rates, increase engagement rates, or monetize more visitors?

Your audience development efforts fall into three of those buckets, which means that audience development, in essence, makes up 75% of your overall publishing goals. If it doesn’t, then how will you have enough people to convert into customers and monetize?

When building email circulation, by most accounts, email capture rate is a proxy metric. You’d be mistaken to say that it’s an exact metric because when we talk about email capture rate, we’re usually talking about the number of people who came to your site from search and social and hit the email capture conversion architecture.

But in reality, that’s only about half of the people who sign up for your email list.

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A quick conversion optimization hack that will eliminate abandons in your email capture flow
It’s not often we can tell you about a conversion optimization tip that will offer you an immediate improvement in your email capture rates, but there is one we are currently adopting with all of our new clients, and we just can’t

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This week we’ll review our mobile best practices for collecting email addresses without ticking off the Google gods. Most of the adjustments we make to mobile conversion architecture is for Google’s benefit, but it also offers better usability for your users. Read below to see how to adjust your own website if you’ve seen conversion rates declining since January.

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Most of the multiplatform media publishers I work with are rich with content assets.

If they’re not rich with revenue, it’s usually because they don’t know how to leverage those assets. Efficiency is key to success in a multiplatform publishing environment. Before you can design a system that minimizes manpower and maximizes automation, you need to do a thorough inventory of your content assets.

Your multiplatform content assets may be spread out in places that you haven’t thought of as repositories. Some of those places may be channels and others may be platforms. It’s also possible that you have a dusty warehouse full of old copies of magazines, books, and other content assets that no one has touched in years.

A Mequoda subscription website Portal generates value from both users and sponsors
Mequoda has guided the development of more than a 300 successful niche media websites on a wide variety of niche media topics. Our best practice is to pair a free subscription website Portal with any premium subscription business model like a magazine or newsletter.

When you charge

Your subscription website publishing performance the key to doubling, or even tripling, your organization’s revenue over the next five years.

How to make highly converting Floaters, pop-ups and mobile interstitial ads SEO-friendly
As you probably know, earlier this month, Google told publishers everywhere that they would begin penalizing them for pop-ups and Floaters which interfere with content on mobile pages. They’ve also told us not to show OFIEs to mobile users, the little order flows that

The most important SEO tip of the month is suppressing floaters and OFIEs for mobile phone users
By now most of you know that Google has decreed popups and interstitial ads, which include Mequoda Best Practice floaters, to be outlawed on mobile phones as of tomorrow, January 10, 2017.

Google objects to the way these ads interfere with

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Now that more than half of all Internet users block pop-ups and Google has banned them from use by PPC buyers, there are two more good reasons to drop this once effective website design technique and look for a better way to increase landing page conversion rates.

If you’ve ever been to one of our events, or you just got dropped on your head when you landed on one of our articles, you’ve probably seen the acronym OFIE here and there.

Around here, using OFIE it in a sentence (pronounced OH FEE) is as common as saying the words “website” or “conversion”. Say it with me, OHHHHH FEEEEEEEE. Or you could spell it out… oh, eff, aye, eee!

Affectionately called OFIEs, “Order Forms in Editorial” are embedded subscription forms that appear on webpages and, indeed, are very much entitled to the respect, consideration, and perhaps even affection of circulators. They are fairly large, coupon-style ads, usually placed in unused space at the bottom of webpages and simply require a user to supply his or her name and address and click “submit”.

If your freemium conversion rate is less than 2, you can use these resources to create better, more compelling and more clickable freebies.

Email is by far, the most profitable marketing channel most publishers use. So it’s no surprise that building an email list is one of the most important items on a publisher’s to-do list

Every successful niche publisher we know uses email as the central resource of their audience development toolbox

As you know, our clients are some of the most incredible before/after examples of niche publishers who have turned their businesses around when they went multiplatform. And there’s not a single Mequoda client without email as the core of

Build an email list by creating free downloads that fit the content theme you are already selling
Freemiums have become the ultimate way to build an email list. The difference in email capture rate between a site that asks readers to sign up for their free newsletter, and one that asks them to sign up and

Mequoda Method for the win

This is a cautionary tale about online publishing strategies … a parable, if you will. It involves no actual Biblical references, and no real-life publishers were harmed in the writing of this post.

But like religion, there are many varieties of online publishing strategies. And the point of this parable is that

A visual website architecture map to show how we get from attraction to monetization
When we talk about our signature ACEM methodology (Attract, Capture, Engage, and Monetize) it’s easy to stop at Capture… or we’ll get to Engage and often pause there for a while, as there’s a critical acknowledgement that the process of attracting, capturing,

I don’t know about you, but the world’s a’changing when it comes to audience development. For a while, I felt like we were so ahead of the curve at Mequoda that we were pretty cool in our pants for a bit, but as we’ve been doing a lot of testing the past few months, it has become clear that user habits are picking up and moving with the wind.

Which is, of course, very exciting as a marketer, because tinkering is what we love to do best.

For the first many years as a publisher, you had one goal and only one goal: increase magazine subscriptions.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Perfection in editorial management is a fallacy. There will always be deadlines that are broken because a source responded at the last minute, and there will be typos that happen even with three sets of eyes on a document; even if your boss is Anna Wintour.

The larger projects online publishers face when becoming multiplatform publishers are often broken into multiple phases to keep the work manageable and the project moving along. Phasing brings focus to the work as it helps employees avoid mental exhaustion that can occur with large, daunting projects.

When building Haven Nexus systems for our clients, we are often transforming a standalone website into a fully integrated multiplatform publishing and marketing system. This isn’t exactly a small task, so we focus on a few phases to prioritize and stay focused.

Use this list to optimize every new and old article or blog on your site in order to attract the most search engine traffic.

Have you started the venture on your next great website design? Maybe your original design was pretty great when you launched, but it’s been a few years now and it’s not so great. What exactly is the definition of great, anyway? Is it a good color pallette? A fancy design? Does it shuffle content more effectively, or draw your eye to the most important calls to action? Does it generate revenue for you? Has it been effective at building an email list? Are you consistently seeing more revenue generated through it than the month before?

You can probably guess at which of these questions are more important than others. If we have to hear another new marketing intern complain about pop-ups without looking at the 20-30% increase in email captures when they launched, we’re going to go all Nate Silver on them. Business goals – do you have them? Good. Are you willing to do what it takes to reach them? Great.

When you think of the term “email analytics” there are two metrics you probably think of first: open rate and click rate.
If those are the only two you can think of off the top of your head, it’s probably because most email service providers use these primary metrics in most of their dashboards.