Short content helps PINK e-mails gain social success

Publication: BtoB Magazine
July 1,2010
By Karen Bannan

PINK magazine (www.pinkmagazine.com) is an online publication that offers professional women advice about career development, delivering tools, tactics and strategies to help them be more successful in business as well as in life. A typical feature might be an interview with a female C-level executive or a feature story about raising investor capital. The magazine’s average reader is worth $1.2 million with an income of $125,000–an excellent target for any advertiser. The magazine’s advertisers–including American Express Co., Dell Inc., Ernst & Young and FedEx Corp.–wanted a way to connect one-to-one with those readers without a lot of clutter, said Bridget Cody, PINK’s director of advertising, so Cody and her team started brainstorming.

“About a year ago we took a step back and noticed that the audience we touch wanted to get information in a timely manner, too, so we came up with an idea: ‘The Little PINK book,’ ” she said.

On January 27, the company launched its newsletter–a daily e-mail that tackles one subject per day in 250 words or less. The chatty, casual newsletters include quizzes, links to outside articles in magazines such as Entrepreneur and Psychology Today and content from the PINK site.

Advertisers who sponsor the newsletter have options such as a 160-by-600 skyscraper, a header and footer, and two rectangles at the bottom of the e-mail. Cody said that many advertisers choose an integrated campaign, purchasing Web placement–often run of site–as well as blog advertising.

The magazine’s readers are extremely engaged–the typical daily newsletter goes out to about 80,000 people each day, although actual opt-ins vary since each focuses on a different topic. “PINK targets different editorial per day: Monday, small business; Tuesday, finance; Wednesday, leadership; Thursday, lifestyle and travel; and Friday, beauty. As a result, we may receive different subscribers who are interested in a certain day of editorial more than others,” Cody said.

Even though it had a strong out-of-the-box subscriber rate, Cody and her team wanted to grow its reach organically, so the company decided to take advantage of social media to encourage recipients to comment on content and share it with friends and colleagues. The Delivra interface includes a “Share” link, with branded buttons to let people post the newsletter on Delicious, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter. There’s also a prominent “Send to a Friend” link.

Since PINK began working with Delivra in February, the newsletter has seen impressive sharing, Cody said. Today, “The Little PINK Book” newsletters have an average of 500 shares per day and 50 shares to social networks, she said–numbers that Cody finds impressive, given the e-mails’ daily frequency. In addition, e-mail metrics are strong.

Since its inception, the digital property has more than doubled the average read rate of 21% with a 12.5% click-through rate and is growing a subscriber base at nearly 10% a month.

Going forward, she said, PINK plans on expanding its advertising options to include geo-targeting to further encourage people to share content while letting advertisers get better targeting. With access to daily reports, “we can see what the audience is most engaged with and make changes based on those metrics,” she said. “It really helps us figure out which articles and content they like more. Social media is a wonder.”

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