Neither here nor there in the big scheme of things. But I thought some of you might find this interesting. On Friday I encouraged TPM Readers to reach out to their members of Congress to find out their current position on the release of the Mueller Report. Here’s the post. Here’s the DIY running tally I was doing through the early afternoon. I’ve suspended that effort for the moment the Second Barr Letter has changed the state of play significantly. I explain where I think we are here. But as part of that effort I used a new part of our system to send a note (an email) to all 29,265 TPM members to let you know what we were doing because I thought time was of the essence and it was a particularly important moment.
When you send almost 30,000 emails you have to use a bulk email service, even if – which I often do – I send them out from my own personal email address so you can email me back. But the services give you some interesting data. 99% of the emails got delivered (28,654) and almost half of them (44.74%) were opened (12,821). About 1100 people clicked on something in the email. But clicking wasn’t the point. The message was the email itself: you can help advance this story by contacting your member of Congress.
None of this is rocket science for a website. Like every other site you visit, for years when you subscribe to TPM you get various email confirmations confirming your purchase and stuff like that. But until recently we didn’t have a system that made it possible for us to do this easily. We had a series of systems and services. But they weren’t well integrated together – mainly because email has never been a big part of how we run the site.
So, for instance, for many years we had a daily morning newsletter (“DayBreaker”), which we discontinued about a year ago. But that was its own separate system that wasn’t connected to our membership database or our site log-in system. You might be a Prime member and subscribe to DayBreaker. But actually the two things weren’t connected in any way. Programmatic emails tied to your membership were integrated with the membership database – sign up confirmation, confirmation of cancelations, renewals etc. But it wasn’t integrated with a system for sending editorial emails or newsletters or whatever else people might want to sign up for or request.
Why weren’t all these different pipes connected up and functioning together? Well, things grow incrementally … and sometimes haphazardly. A small organization has to balance improvements and integrations with mission critical things like keeping the site online. But more than anything else, these things just weren’t that mission critical until the last few years when subscriptions and memberships became the cornerstone of our operation.
In the old system, the business side of what we do was based on getting as many people to visit the site and read as many pages as possible. Obviously our editorial imperatives were the real driving force. But in business terms we were essentially in the page view business since that’s how digital advertising is sold. With our focus on subscriptions, if a subscriber would prefer to have the top stuff emailed to them each morning, great. That works too. The direct relationship allows us to cater more directly to our core readers and create more options.
