Ph.ly News Weekly: one year of sending a local journalism newsletter 5.10.13 0
by in Case Study

ph.ly

One year ago, we announced Ph.ly, a locally-minded URL shortener that was also home to an experiment: a weekly email service that promised to share the three biggest, most meaningful journalism stories in Philadelphia.

subscribersWe called it the Ph.ly/NewsWeekly and after getting a rush of some 1,500 subscribers to start, the service has slowly grown to more than 1,700 weekly subscribers.

Big mistake from my part? The first few weeks I A/B tested by way of keeping the A subject line the same for several weeks. The result was that for a portion of the list early on, Ph.ly ended up in the spam folder. That happens often to new regular lists and we’ve since largely grown out of it, but our strong open rates could likely be even higher.

open-rates

You can see an archive of the recent newsletters and sign up at Ph.ly/NewsWeekly.

Media attention help:

Christopher Wink is the cofounder of publishing consultancy firm Technically Media and its technology news network Technically Philly. Wink has reported for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Metro, Philadelphia CityPaper, SportsIllustrated.com and other publications. The journalist lives in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. He maintains a personal blog here and tweets from @christopherwink.

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