Why email is a force not to be ignored for regional news publishers

Gotta stay relevant. Right? In these times of mounting audiences, mobile consumption and a young savvy internet audience really finding their groove - how do you ensure you can still reach these audiences and get them coming back to your content time and time again? I am speaking on Wednesday at the Technology for Marketers and Advertisers (sounds terrifying doesn't it, will they brainwash me? Is the future of advertising some kind of microchip inside your shoe telling Tesco what your little toe is thinking about buying next...) event about what Trinity Mirror Regionals have been doing (that is who I work for in case you are wondering) with email newsletters. EMAIL!? But Ed, I hear you cry, email is about as sexy as, well, it isn't very sexy. Let me remind you of something. What do you need to be able to have an account on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+? That's right, an email address. Email is a shockingly bad form of my communication, just ask anyone who works for or with me when they try and second guess what I mean by a one word response of Yes to an email at 11.45pm on a Friday. BUT, one thing I have learned since Spring 2012 when we started on an email newsletter sort them out journey is that a heck of a lot of people still use it, like using it and it isn't going anywhere quickly. For regional news organisations email is a great uniting factor for our online audiences and we need to ensure we are able to communicate with our readers by it, in a way they want. Email is a fantastic tool for re-engaging our readers on a daily basis. Look at any ABCe figures released for national and regional titles in the UK and in amongst all the unique users and page views you can do a very basic calculation. How often do our readers visit our site every week or month? Answer, not many. Yet how many times will they log into Facebook or Twitter a day, you see the challenge. What email gives us is an equaliser because what news sites have is fantastic and compelling content, so if delivered to the audience through a communication channel of their choosing (email, social or both in many of our readers cases) we can start to engage those readers more often. We are in a constant battle for attention and email + social is a great way to hold it. Just look at how Twitter have started sending daily, sometimes twice daily, automated digests of the top tweets from people you follow. It is a bit hit and miss, but it does make me come back to Twitter even more often. But it has to be done right , I am fortunate to work with one of the best designers out there - Chris Lam - and in 2011 when we first started this email thing he said any emails must look good on smartphones and tablets. Having just got out of a Blackberry contract at this point he had a blinding point, mobile consumption was building at this stage and only going to get higher and where do people increasingly receiving emails? What app does every device come fitted with? Emails. On the to. In bed. On the train. Ping. Ping. Ping. And our emails from our regional news brands have custom subject lines to make sure they invite you to read it, and we guarantee we will be far more interesting than that latest meeting invite email you have just had from the marketing department. We recently nailed it with restarting email newsletters built for Man United and Man City fans for the Manchester Evening News. A no brained you might think. Yes, but we had a very old data set which we needed to check still had bite. So we designed a custom campaign asking thousands of readers Are you red or are you blue? Not surprisingly hundreds bit very quickly and we're soon receiving a daily email with either United or City content. And we have seen open rates of in excess of 60% and click rates 30%+ and I am reliably told these kinds of figures get marketing people REALLY EXCITED. But we have to be consistent with these sends and ensure our subject line is always engaging, to United and City fans we want them to smile, open and click when they see that email drop into their inbox or their phone vibrate in their pocket. It's time to read is what we want them to think, not think, oh, another bloody email. And it has been really interesting to watch the use of email by our colleagues over on Ampp3d, Trinity Mirror's data journalism project. I know roughly when it is just before 5pm everyday because their data journalism missive lands in my inbox. It is lovingly put together, just see Martin Belam's tweets, each weekday to pull their content together and pull together other interesting stuff.

Tonight’s newsletter includes both @edballsmp and @DavidBowieReal - what a duo that would be. Sign up here: http://t.co/V7CoeglcJx

— Ampp3d (@ampp3d) February 18, 2014

But it is like any other content, if it is not lovingly put together with passion and a thought for the audience reading it then why should we be surprised if they don't want to engage with it? And let me leave you with this, our highest open and click rates come from email newsletters sent on a Sunday evening during some tests I did with a couple of our big regional bands.That tells you everything you need to know about our email audience....