How Morning Brew Engaged Its Subscribers Through Email Marketing Tactics

By Lauren Harris On Oct 2, 2019

Building a newsletter program can be difficult as a recent HubSpot article shared that open rates for newsletters for most companies “are lucky to hit 17%.” But, building a newsletter program focused on information instead of promotion can be even more challenging. Not only does the information provided need to be relevant, but it also needs to be engaging enough to inspire subscribers to open the next campaign.

This is the challenge that the crew at Morning Brew, a daily newsletter providing updates on events in the business world, recently faced as they sought to expand their readership with a fun and unique newsletter style offering tech and business news. With the help of partners, the team managed to pull off this difficult task and not only build a strong following, but an award-winning newsletter.

In order to fully understand the success of the Morning Brew team’s efforts and how to apply them to your own marketing work, let’s first break down the steps the team took to make this campaign work.

Identifying Campaign Goals

First, the Morning Brew team identified the goals of the campaign. In this case, the team sought to educate and inform millions of young professionals about the latest news in tech and business. While this kind of information is traditionally presented in a very dry and dense format that doesn’t entice young readers, Morning Brew sought to make the consumption of this kind of news an enjoyable experience through the use of witty and charismatic journalism as a way to help younger readers enjoy the experience of reading news while becoming more informed about the world around them.

As attractive as this concept seemed at the beginning however, of course there were some challenges.

Overcoming Challenges

Morning Brew faced a variety of challenges from the start, one of which stemmed from the fact that they had limited knowledge about the email space. When Morning Brew first started looking at Email Marketing strategies, they were a small startup with just a few employees whose collective knowledge about the space was not extensive. As Morning Brew continued to scale, they wanted a partner who could help teach their employees about this space. Whether it was setting up re-engagement campaigns or implementing automated emails, they required a foundation for their employees that they could utilize to achieve big results.

Once the foundation was set, the team optimally utilized tools to help achieve their results. For instance, Morning Brew used partner tools to monitor their IP reputation closely to make sure that the health of their IP addresses was not affecting deliverability as they migrated to a new ESP. Partner tools also gave them the ability to identify problems with particular providers and engage support whenever they needed it. Especially when they migrated from a shared IP address to two dedicated IP addresses, it became even more important for monitoring to occur to ensure any negative impact was minimal.

Campaign Results

Morning Brew now has a daily unique open rate north of 45 percent and about a 10 percent click-through rate across its list of 1.5 million active users, which is considered one of the highest engaged audiences in the email space. In addition, over 225,000 people have shared Morning Brew using a unique referral code to at least one person. Lastly, its Light Roast newsletter, which is reserved for people with three or more referrals, now has over 37,500 subscribers. These results helped amplify the work of Morning Brew and create a devoted following that has only continued to grow.

In the end, the work of the Morning Brew team proves that strong Email Marketing efforts can be a lifeline to help bring a fascinating new idea to fruition. Especially when migrating to a new ESP or dealing with IP address health, monitoring can ensure that growth continues to happen at an organic and positive rate.

While understanding the basics of Email Marketing is obvious for success, going above and beyond always yields better results to the point where you could make disciples of your own for your efforts.