#feature case study

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/modern-farmers-smart-newsletters-and-web-to-print-conversions/

Modern Farmer’s Smart Newsletters and Web-to-Print Conversions

For a young, fairly niche publication about farming lifestyle and food culture, Modern Farmer sure seems to be everywhere. Barely a year old, the magazine’s experiencing a surge in growth and recognition—including a 2014 National Magazine Award for Best Magazine Section, for which it beat out established titles like GQ, Vanity Fair, and New York.

At a time when people are more curious about where their food comes from, Modern Farmer’s Digital Director Jake Swearingen acknowledges that much of his team’s growth has been a factor of having the right idea at the right time.

“I hate to use the word ‘organic’ because it makes it sound so cliché, especially for a magazine called Modern Farmer,” he admits. “But I think we’re also just lucky to come into this idea that nobody else has really done in this way before.”

Modern Farmer has a daily website and a quarterly print publication, so it made sense for them to use a newsletter to spur growth in readership and subscribers. Originally, they’d planned to send a campaign monthly, but they instantly got such a tremendous response that they upped it to once—then twice—a week.

Modern Farmer‘s emails include a mix of top stories from the magazine and website along with less-popular-but-still-great pieces that deserve a second chance at the spotlight. They’ve realized that, as Fast Company recently said, “newsletters cater to people who want to stay informed without feeling like a slave to the Twitter stream.” An email waits for you in your inbox, rather than expecting you to keep up with it; in other words, an email plays by your rules.

“As editors and media people, we spend all day on Twitter and Facebook,” Jake says. “We sort of forget that, for 95% of the population, they don’t spend all their time just constantly reading media to see what else is new.”

Social media has a role in growing their list, too, though. When a story is doing really well, like when it’s linked on a major website or retweeted by someone influential, Modern Farmer takes advantage of increased site traffic by issuing a pop-up form asking first-time site visitors to sign up for the newsletter. Although Jake admits the tactic is a little in-your-face, “the complaints have been minimal and results have been pretty inarguable.” They typically add anywhere from 2,000-3,000 new newsletter subscribers a month and have gone from zero to more than 25,000 in the span of a year.

Of course, Modern Farmer never forgets they’ve got a print magazine to sell. Email helps with that, too, providing their loyal web readers an opportunity to turn into loyal print subscribers. As a thank you, new email subscribers are sent an automated email upon signup, offering them a discount code for a print magazine subscription. And every newsletter that goes out also includes a link to subscribe to the print magazine. That link gets anywhere 20-70 clicks per campaign.

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/elevationlab-grows-with-email-and-kickstarter/

ElevationLab Grows With Email and Kickstarter

ElevationLab‘s latest Kickstarter campaign, for an iMac and Apple monitor stand, ended in June and raised 500% of its goal. But that’s nothing by the company’s standards.

Their first Kickstarter, for an iPhone dock, raised $1.4 million in 2012. It hit its initial funding goal of $75,000 in 8 hours, tripling the previous 24-hour Kickstarter record, and was the first crowdfunded project to top $1 million. "That was crazy and scary at the same time," ElevationLab founder Casey Hopkins says. "Probably more scary. Now we’re more established, and our manufacturing is in place. We’ve got a bunch of new products that’ll come out in the next 6 months."

Any other company might be preparing a barrage of emails in advance of those new products. But ElevationLab isn’t like any other company.

Send sparingly, test frequently

Casey started ElevationLab on his own in 2011, and the company has grown along with each successful product. They’ve got five people in the office now, and 3 to 10 people working on the manufacturing side, depending on sales spikes.

"It’s good," Casey says of the company’s growth. "It’s also a huge pain in the ass. But it’s pretty fun to be able to design and make our own stuff, and send it off to people around the world."

ElevationLab has only sent a handful campaigns in the two years they’ve been MailChimp customers, but that’s by design. Well, mostly. "We have 20,000 customers that we send to, but we don’t do it enough," Casey says. "We’ve found that it’s the most effective [marketing tool] by far. We do it for new product announcements, about 75% of people open it, and we get a ton of business from it."

While he appreciates email as a tool, he also often finds it irritating as a medium. As such, he’s careful with his company’s e-missives, reserving them for when they have new products or a sale to promote. "I unsubscribe from everything, and I try to treat [our newsletters] like if I was getting an email," he says. "I don’t want to send anything if there’s not a real reason for it."

ElevationLab only sends a couple times per year—and they test like crazy. "We iterate a lot," Casey says. "A couple dozen of those to whittle [each email] down until it’s good and concise. We’re all in the same office, looking over each other’s shoulders. I always get real nervous when we hit ‘Send.’"

Email + crowdfunding = growth

Much like Robocat, ElevationLab quickly learned that email marketing and crowdfunding play nice together. Plus, when you’re a company that sells things online that’s getting ready to announce a new product, you’ve already got a loyal group of fans in your email list.

"Right when we launched, we sent out an email, and I bet half our backers [came from that campaign]," Casey says. "It’s a pretty niche product. Not a lot of people have Mac monitors. I know like two friends who have Mac monitors. The upfront cost was so much, I wasn’t gonna risk it without knowing if there were enough people who wanted them."

So, why make a niche product with a ton of upfront cost? "Well, I wanted it for myself," he says, laughing. "You kinda figure if it’s something you want there’s a good chance there’s other people out there who think the same way. We’ve got some mass consumer products in the pipeline, though."