What readers told the FT about its newsletters

Sarah Ebner and Michael Hoole of the Financial Times write about how it analyzes the success of its newsletters.

Ebner and Hoole write, “The results of the survey were beyond our most optimistic predictions, with over 78,000 responses (so far) since we launched in March. We can see the most popular newsletters in terms of scores given, and also the least popular. We can see which newsletters led to many surveys filled in (a good sign of engagement), and which haven’t.

“Some very opinionated newsletters might have lower overall satisfaction scores because they are naturally more divisive. However, these also have higher engagement than a summary or daily briefing type of newsletter. Dividing our newsletters by format or category can result in fairer comparisons.

“Here’s how we’ve utilized learnings from the survey so far:

“We tried to match readers’ motivations for subscribing with the content and form of the newsletter. For example, if our audience indicated that their main reason for reading the newsletter was the writer him or herself, then this could mean that the writer could afford to be more verbose. However, if the motivation was to quickly get up to speed with the latest news on a particular topic, then we would need to focus on ensuring that the newsletter was concise and informative. We have implemented changes due to reader responses, cutting back certain sections, for example, so they aren’t as long, or making things clearer.”

Read more here.