The following newsletters were created during my time at Atlas Obscura.
While managing newsletters at Atlas Obscura, I wrote, edited, and curated the Daily, Gastro Obscura, and Weekly newsletters for a combined audience of almost 600,000 subscribers.
Atlas Obscura Daily Newsletter
To grow traffic on the Daily Newsletter developed and led multiple A/B testing projects to test newsletter subject lines and content strategies. Results from these projects grew open rates by 10% and page views by 38.7%.
Daily Newsletter (Franchise Sends)
Converting editorial lists into newsletter franchise sends was one of my most successful projects. To help raise engagement, I created a weekly schedule to replace a regular Daily Newsletter send with a themed newsletter. This ‘franchise send’ highlighted the most engaging topics and destinations I discovered readers most wanted to read after conducting a data project analyzing the top keywords and stories our newsletter readers engaged with.
They had a 28% average open rate, which is 4% higher than average. These sends also brought in an average 42% PVs/recipients who opened—12% more than what regularly curated newsletter sends brought to the site.
Perhaps the most significant return we received from the test, however, is the average PVs received from each newsletter. These franchise sends had an average of 44,367 PVs per newsletter, which is 16% higher than average.
You can see three examples of these newsletter franchise sends below.
Gastro Obscura Newsletter
Throughout my time at Atlas Obscura, I conducted a series of projects using A/B testing to determine which types of conduct perform best for our audiences. After discovering that stories from the Gastro Obscura Food Database and older, historically high-performing conduct increased traffic significantly, I began to regular schedule this type of content in the newsletter and its subject lines.
These tests increased open rates by 8% and increased the amount of page views brought to the site by 52%.
Atlas Obscura Weekly Newsletter
During my time at Atlas Obscura, I helped grow our weekly newsletter audience by 131%.
By switching the strategy of this newsletter sent to reflect the most-read stories of the previous week, while consistently recirculating our most popular database place and food entries, I helped increase the average amount of page views brought to the site by 261%.
