mailbox
Credit: Image from Pixabay

When it comes to newsletters, Quartz has set the bar for many news organisations, doubling its number of subscribers to 700,000 in 2017 and achieving open rates of 78 per cent for some of its email products.

The organisation has five newsletters: the daily Quartz Daily Brief and Quartz Obsession, and Quartz Africa Weekly, Quartz Index and Quartzy, which are sent weekly.

For this post on Medium, Cate Blouke, writer at Really Good Emails, spoke with Quartz's email team about how they put together their newsletters. For example, readers are segmented according to their region and time zone, and the key metric the team looks at is the active number of subscribers.

"Besides open rates, we look at the qualitative feedback we get from users who are replying to the email, or interacting on Twitter. Some topics provoke more conversation than others but if I get even one response that says 'I didn’t think I was going to be interested in this topic, but I learned some fascinating things' I count that as a successful email," said Jessanne Collins, Obsession email editor.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).