How the WSJ is increasing readership via push notifications

Joseph Lichterman of the Nieman Lab writes about how The Wall Street Journal has increased readership via changes in its push notification system.

Lichterman writes, “To improve its understanding of those alerts, the paper started using a new weighted open rate — one that discounts devices that hadn’t opened the Journal’s app in more than two months. The Journal has also begun A/B testing its alerts, and it’s looking at ways to focus on individual users regardless of what devices they use to access the Journal’s apps.

“The alcohol notification was one of the top three most-opened push alerts the Journal has ever sent, Emerson said. In fact, the Journal’s five best-performing notifications were all sent in the second half of 2016, he said. Those alerts would all still be the the top performing notifications using traditional open rates as well, he said. (The top notification? An alert sent the night before Election Day that offered latest predictions on various races. It was ‘six orders of magnitude above the average open rate.’)

“Since the weighted open rate was implemented last March, the Journal’s average open rate increased by 21 percent, Emerson told me. With the traditional open rate, there was about a half a percentage point difference between the variability of the highest and lowest performing alerts. By factoring out the dormant devices, the variability jumps to about two percentage points.

“The Journal wouldn’t share any other data, however, including average open rate, the number of devices with the app downloaded, or the number of dormant devices.”

Read more here.