Speaking during WAN-IFRA’s recent Digital Media India virtual conference, Chakraborty added that every metric they were tracking saw gradual growth from November 2021 through January this year. 

During this period, the Deccan Herald was among a small group of participants of a Digital Subscription Bootcamp, which was led by Gregor Waller, Principal Consultant, WAN-IFRA Consulting, along with Ola Henriksson, WAN-IFRA Expert Advisor, Independent Media Consultant, who also moderated the session. The bootcamp was organised by WAN-IFRA and supported by the Meta Journalism Project India.

The main objectives of the programme, which involved six individual modules with coaching in between, were to help the publishers drive engagement and learn techniques to grow digital subscriptions.

Chakraborty said that during the bootcamp, Deccan Herald (DH) had a few main focus areas, which included:

• Enhancement of user engagement
• Development of loyal readers
• Acquiring user-sign-ups/user data

For example, she said as part of this process, they did an analysis of their brand lovers and loyal readers. For each category and article, they tried to understand how their brand lovers and loyal readers were interacting with the content. Based on this analysis, the editorial team worked on categories that were found to be highly engaging.

“Our brand lovers increased by 1 percent each month, and loyal readers increased by 36 percent during the three month period,” Chakraborty said.

During the bootcamp, they also began an analysis of engagement score: “We have been doing constant analysis of the engagement score and a weekly analysis of the engagement percentage to understand every story that is of a higher engagement score for us,” she said.

The aim, she said, is to find out how and why those articles are giving them a higher engagement score.

Next, they began adding in more text links within articles, which has helped the recirculation of their other articles by 5 percent within the website, Chakraborty said.

Launch of newsletters

During the bootcamp, a major project for Deccan Herald was the creation of a newsletter initiative. “We designed curated newsletters for our readers from different segments to engage them and gain user sign-ups,” she said.

The major hypothesis for Deccan Herald, she added, was that the newsletters would help them increase subscriptions and gain access to first-party data, thereby adding more users and readers to their brand loyalty base.

“Also, with the newsletter programme we intend to increase user engagement and create touch points for readers to land on our website in an easy and hassle free manner,” Chakraborty said.

In all, they have planned seven topics of newsletters, of which two are “live.” With elections coming up, she said they decided to start with a political newsletter they are calling “DH Political Theatre.”

The second is a newsletter called “Top News of the Day,” where they provide a breakdown of whatever the major news for that particular day is.

She said the other newsletters topics in development are: DH Video on Demand, Best of DH Opinion, Tune in to DH Radio, The DH Sportsletter, and DH on Weekends.

“We designed an overall journey where a user would be able to discover our newsletters,” Chakraborty told participants. “We planned on creating a button for the newsletters, a Call to Action (CTA) button on the menu page for users to discover the newsletters landing page. We also have an opt-in widget present on different article pages, so that users can sign-up directly from that opt-in widget to our newsletters.”

She noted that readers can either sign up for a newsletter around a particular topic that they are interested in, or sign up for all the newsletters at once.

As of the time of the Digital Media India conference, the Political Theatre newsletter had been published five times, had a “substantial number of users” and an open rate of around 27 percent, Chakraborty said.

Next, she said they plan to begin experimenting with different subject lines and analyse the results.

“Also we are currently sending the newsletter on Saturdays, and we are planning to analyse our results and experiment with a different day of the week and see how our open rate changes,” she added.

Three key learnings

Chakraborty pointed to three key learnings from the bootcamp:

• The formation of an in-house “growth team” that she said has helped them identify challenges and come up with effective solutions.
• Engagement analysis where they have started evaluating the engagement score of articles and categorising them as resonating with Brand Lovers or Loyal Readers, for example, and also understanding which types of articles are performing well for them.
• Better understanding of reader preferences. With different type of newsletters, she said, they aim to understand their readers’ news consumption patterns, and their preferred category of news, as well as the percentage of returning visitors.

Outlook for 2022

Looking forward, Chakraborty said Deccan Herald wants to do a complete newsletter marketing programme.

“We plan to use social media marketing for promoting the newsletter to our readers,” she said. “Also, we have an already present base with us, that is of our mobile app users. So we want to do automated and scheduled notifications to the already present app users for newsletter sign-ups.”

In addition, she said they plan to take their newsletters forward and experiment with different sets of audiences.

Along those lines, they want to have different campaigns with various ad focuses for different audiences to try to understand how these audiences are interacting with their newsletter categories.