From newsletter articles to event agendas, across the publishing industry there is another “A” phrase sitting right alongside AI at the top of the agenda — audience engagement.
The drive among publishers worldwide to offset traffic declines from search and social media is placing a heavy emphasis on audience engagement tactics, underpinned by building or rebooting their first-party data strategies.
The bulk of these conversations are geared at solving the technology blockers behind effectively leveraging first-party data — too many disparate systems that don’t talk to each other, creating overly complex workflows and a muddled picture of who their audience is and what they want.
The good news, while those larger, and longer, tech conversations are taking place, is there are simple tactics with little effort required that publishers can use today to get extra screen time and audience engagement. What’s even better — while many of these are starters to underpin a larger planned strategy — they provide good testing opportunities while enriching your first-party data profiles. Here are five to get you started.
Allowing readers to mark pages or articles as “favorite” is not much more complex than an on-site/in-app bookmark. It’s a small start, but opens the door to sophisticated reader-curated content experiences and content personalization based on preferences and sends a huge message to audience and content teams that something is hitting the mark with readers.
“Save for later” is an additional bookmarking tactic for readers in a hurry. Enabling users to pin an article inside their profile removes the need to remember each piece they’re interested in, share it to themselves, or save it to a reader app like Pocket or a browser-based reading list. Not only does a “save for later” feature encourage users to remain logged-in, it also refines your analytics for better similar reading suggestions.
Allowing a user to follow a genre or type of content sends strong signals to your audience and editorial teams that this person really likes something, which is great for commercial potential. It’s another encouragement to stay logged-in, naturally leading into things like segmented newsletters, and is great research toward personalization and self-curation.
Similarly, allowing a user to “follow” writers brings lots of benefits: it signals to audience teams and writers the things people want more of, it amplifies author profile pages (great for SEO), and it’s a really good reason for a reader to sign-up for a notification or alert. Again, no extra content is needed at all — but you have a rich target audience if you want to start experimenting with premium or exclusive content.
Newsletter strategies have seen increasing growth and it’s easy to see why — no additional content work is needed, just let readers choose to receive emails of article summaries or headlines. You don’t need premium content, but newsletters are very effective at transitioning free customers to paid when you have premium content offerings in them.
As for those fears that newsletters undermine site traffic, worry not, heavy newsletter readers tend to be both much more engaged and read more on sites, not less. As with many of the other tactics noted, newsletter engagement provides additional data points to build your first-party data picture of each reader.
For an ad-supported site, turning off ads for logged-in users demands the calculation of reduced ad views versus the value of having an email address of an engaged reader.
This might seem counterintuitive to supporting commercial goals, but if you’re basing your revenue on programmatic ads, this tactic is easy to calculate and can quickly pay for itself by giving a mailing list for future newsletters or targeted content.
Comments are skyrocketing in signaling what users care about. Younger readers are increasingly going to the comments section to see what is being said before reading the article text (if they even do). As with previous suggestions, this product feature doesn’t require producing content, in fact a Comment section capturing user reaction and feedback can be a goldmine for future content planning.
An additional in-article tactic gaining audience engagement steam is embedding a poll or survey. At its most basic, a simple “Yes/No” vote will be effective, but you can certainly go further with more probing questions. Whatever time is spent creating the questions is rewarded with the ability to address the poll’s outcome in follow-up content.
Audience engagement is the stickiness which keeps sites and apps busy even when you’re not producing new content. At Glide Publishing Platform, we work with editorial teams as much as we work with commercial and tech teams, so we understand all sides of the equation.
This understanding was central to the development of our audience interaction platform, Glide Nexa, and its ability to remove the tech barriers in making first-party data actionable. But even when you have your technologies aligned, any feature development inside a site or app needs something to incentivize readers to use it. And that’s the secret to audience engagement. These small features not only deepen relationships, but they also begin to unlock valuable data — preferences, habits and behaviors — that can drive personalization and product development.
To learn more about Glide Publishing Platform and Glide Nexa, visit www.gpp.io or request to speak to a Glide product specialist.
