How Quartz has doubled its email signup rate

Quartz’s Daily Brief, an email newsletter that surpassed 50,000 subscribers earlier this year recently changed its sign-up process, reducing friction and enabling a more seamless subscription experience.

The result is that Quartz, a business news site from The Atlantic, has doubled the rate of sign-ups.

When Quartz launched in 2012, it wanted to build an account framework that could handle all its future aspirations—personalization, geolocation, read-it-later, offline mode, annotations, user settings, and a variety of email subscriptions.

As it set out to build the account system, it only made sense to make creating an account a requirement for email signup. If it was going to eventually build in other functionality centered around a specific user, it made sense to have everything tied together, right?

This is probably the way most people get to such a problem: planning so much for what you might want to build down the line that you instead make the user experience less appealing for the functionality you have available right now. In reality, requiring accounts just slowed down the Daily Brief signup process for a lot of people, frustrated others, and turned many off from signing up entirely.

Near the end of 2013, Quartz decided to redesign the email signup and account registration flows in an effort to make them more appealing. But it quickly became obvious that the problem was not about the aesthetics. If Quartz wanted more email subscribers, it would have to make it easier for people to subscribe.

Quartz decided to break off the email signup process from accounts entirely. Accounts would now govern its annotations product and any other features down the road that truly demand an account.

Since it rolled out the new system on February 19, the daily subscriber rate has doubled, even on weekends when activity dips considerably. Users can now sign up via “in-stream units” or through the Daily Brief landing page. Of the people that view that page, a full 60 percent of them now go on to subscribe.

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