Newsletter Redesign

Overview

I was the content director and core contributor (content and research) for a cross-functional effort focused on redesigning the Common Sense Education newsletter. This redesign was a reinvention of the product and content strategy for Common Sense, executed to better meet the needs of educators.

This was a deeply collaborative effort, and I have to give credit to my colleagues Jeff Knutson, Christine Elgersma, and Graham Herrli for their partnership.

Problem

Common Sense’s education newsletter’s subscribers and open rate had flatlined. Meanwhile, traffic to our website, once the primary destination for our offerings, was declining. Based on weekly user interviews as well as studying educational trends, we’d discovered teachers were only visiting a handful of websites and consuming most of their information on social media or via newsletters. This presented both a problem and opportunity: on the one hand, teacher engagement was declining across all of our channels; on the other, there was the possibility of reinventing the newsletter and focusing content efforts and marketing there to build back engagement and facilitate word-of-mouth and user flow to our other offerings on-site.

Solution

Transform the newsletter into an essential destination for teachers and the front door for Common Sense content, driving user acquisition and flow toward more substantive resources on the Common Sense site.

Research Process

• Surveyed our existing user base to understand their needs and the newsletters they found useful.
• Audited our existing newsletter data (open rate, clickthrough, subscriber growth).
• Prototyped a new newsletter format focused more on storytelling and timely, pressing topics. Each newsletter would be written by a member of the Common Sense staff, and unlike our existing newsletter that was a list of content, any links or resources would be linked within the story.
• Conducted semi-structured interviews with think alouds where users were shown the prototype and existing newsletter.
• Revised prototypes then conducted A/B test sends of the old format vs. the new format. Our key metric was open rate and our secondary metrics were clickthrough (especially on content at the bottom of the newsletter) as well as shares/forwards.

Interestingly, users said during interviews that they would prefer a shorter, link-focused format; however, the longer, storytelling-focused newsletter fueled equal or more overall engagement during tests. We also found the storytelling content led to far more compelling titles that drove open rate without feeling like we were doing a bait and switch.

After launch, we closely monitored open rate, subscribers, and click through, as well as a short running survey within the newsletter, to judge overall performance and further refine design and content strategy.

Results

• One third of subscribers reported sharing the newsletter with a colleague, driving viral growth
• Added 6,372 subscribers in the first three months, setting off a consistent month over month growth pattern
• Published newsletter authored by people from across the organization and educators within the Common Sense community
• Broke down internal silos, creating thematic content that integrated work being done across the organization

Postscript

One of the things that was most successful, and challenging, was helping to onboard, training, and coordinate contributions to the newsletter from across the organization. Many were not confident writers and needed a lot of support. My team developed a style guide, editorial guidelines, calendar, and instructive, annotated prototypes that we could use to both maintain consistency and train other staff members. This was largely successful and had the added benefit of building cross-organizational buy-in and raising the visibility of our work.