How Quartz is reinventing the email newsletter

Greg Dool of Folio writes about how the financial news website Quartz is having success with is email newsletter.

Dool writes, “Four years, 16 million unique monthly readers, two international expansions, and one messaging-style mobile news app later, Quartz has become a prime embodiment of the ‘digital native’ media brand archetype—thanks in no small part to its witty, informative, and intensely curated email newsletter, which now boasts more than 200,000 subscribers, according to the company.

“Selecting email as a key channel in the media mix—the Daily Brief has been around since Quartz’s inception—may have seemed like an odd play for a brand that marketed itself as forward-thinking. For one, Lauf says, email was a widely overlooked mechanism for connecting with audiences, an automated marketing vehicle often existing solely to drive clicks back to publishers’ websites.

“‘We thought that an email product shouldn’t just be headlines to drive you back to the website,’ Lauf says. ‘Rather, we asked, ‘What would we want from an email product? How could an email we receive every morning make us smarter?”

“The result was a daily newsletter delivered in the morning and designed to tell readers not just what happened while they were sleeping, but what to expect for the day ahead. Unlike most newsletter products, not all of the links go back to Quartz’s website, qz.com. In fact, most go to outside sources, even competitors.”

Read more here.