How Morning Brew focuses on total opens, not total subscribers

Kayleigh Barber of Digiday looks at how business news newsletter publisher Morning Brew is trying to get disengaged readers back.

Barber writes, “Newsletter publisher Morning Brew has a quick-triggered filtering process of dealing with disengaged readers. Tyler Denk, senior product lead, said that the company currently has 1.6 million active subscribers for its daily newsletter, but it’s constantly churning subscribers who have lowered their engagement level and over the course of its lifetime, it’s had over 3 million.

“If at any given point since signing up a reader hasn’t opened the newsletter for 60 days, Denk said a reengagement email will go out and if they don’t respond within 48 hours, the name is removed from the list. But for those who sign up and don’t open the first email within three weeks, the same 48-hour reengagement process begins, with slightly different messaging.

“‘We have pretty strict churning process, so if you show levels of you not engaging with the newsletter, we don’t care about the vanity metric of total subscribers. We really care about the total opens,’ said Denk. ‘If we acquire you as a subscriber and you stop reading, we don’t really care to keep you on our list for the sake of saying we have more subscribers. We keep open rates high, which makes deliverability better, which increases the total unique opens, which is the only metric that really matters.'”

Read more here.