The FT is using polls in its newsletters to increase retention

The Financial Times is incorporating polls into its email newsletters to encourage readers to interact more regularly with its content and ultimately increase subscriber retention, reports Lucinda Southern of Digiday.

Southern writes, “Since March, the publisher has run 27 polls in its most popular newsletter, FirstFT, a subscriber-only newsletter that has well over 100,000 followers, according to the publisher. This newsletter is a morning roundup of the top global stories containing links to other FT articles, which the publisher measures via click-through rates. So far, the FT has seen the polls drive the highest click-through rates of all other links, though it wouldn’t share specific numbers.

“‘It’s new for us to be thinking of the newsletter platform for community building; we’re working out what that looks like,’ said Renée Kaplan, head of audience and new content strategies at the FT. ‘We’re in the early stages of that, of levering engagement to build community, which is different from just engagement. When people are more committed and have a sense of belonging to a community, they open more frequently and become all the more valuable.’

“The goal is to build up consumption with content in the newsletters, in turn improving open rates. This April, the FT crossed the 1 million paying subscribers threshold. However, as the majority of the FT’s newsletters are for subscribers, the goal for its dozens of email newsletters is to retain readers. Kaplan wouldn’t share the latest open-rate figures, but open rates have previously been reported to be between 25% and 50%.”

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