Newsletter signups increase
250%
Returning visitorship increase
79%
The background: Founder, CEO, and Editor, Lorie Hearn started inewsource in 2009. It was one of the early local digital news startups in the United States and serves the region of San Diego, California through impactful, data-based investigative, and accountability journalism.
As a nonprofit digital-first news organization, inewsource relies on Newspack’s suite of solutions to manage subscriptions and donations, engage its audience via newsletters, customize its website, and more.
The bottom line: Newspack’s tools, together with inewsource’s innovative product offerings, have driven higher engagement. And as participants of Newspack’s Revenue Development Program, they were able to increase newsletter signups by over 250%.
The big picture
Switching to a new content management system can be daunting, so inewsource was skeptical about moving to Newspack.
“There’s always a concern that locking yourself into a CMS ecosystem with a contract could end up being a bad move. We wanted to make sure that migrating meant less work, not more,” recalls inewsource Product Manager, Giovanni Moujaes.
The team was considering a new CMS because their previous one hindered innovation and growth. “We needed a central tech stack we could build off of, so we could focus more on business development and less on tech troubleshooting,” said Moujaes. They also needed more consistency with style across their website and better ways to display their news.
“It became clear Newspack presented the most compelling suite of an optimization-forward CMS, design flexibility, and product support that would allow our small team to focus more intentionally on other aspects of our business while providing the tools necessary to both add value to our user experience out of the box and customize it to our liking,” recalled Moujaes.
The day-to-day: Moujaes spends a lot of time with Newspack as the person in charge of user experience at inewsource.
He’s most often using Newspack Campaigns to generate calls to action and Newspack Newsletters to reach their readers. “We love the Newspack Campaigns tool because it’s an easy and effective way to generate CTAs across our website for newsletters and donations.” He also shared his enthusiasm for the newsletter signup block. Because the newsletters block is native to Newspack, they can customize it to look like the rest of their site.
“There are a lot of companies trying to find solutions to target their audience, but those systems don’t always talk nicely to each other. Newspack’s suite of solutions does, which also makes the learning curve a lot easier.”
Newspack’s ease of use helps speed up Moujaes’ workflow. Because he uses Newspack a lot in his day-to-day work, he’s grateful he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use the technology. But when he does have a question or comes across an issue he reaches out to the Newspack support team in the help channel on Slack. “Newspack’s technical account managers all come with different skills and experiences, which makes it a lot easier to get a fast answer to a question.”
Getting to the next level: Moujaes is constantly analyzing performance metrics and thinking about how to enhance the user experience, increase reader engagement, and drive revenue.
When Newspack introduced the Revenue Development Program — a complementary coaching program designed to help Newspack publishers optimize their use of the technology — Moujaes jumped at the chance to join the beta phase.
He knew there were opportunities for inewsource to improve SEO and increase newsletter signups. For example, their Follow Us page had too many CTAs, which wasn’t good for SEO or the user experience.
Through the program, Moujaes learned how to improve inewsource’s growth strategy by making tactical improvements. One of the most important tactics he learned was the importance of simple landing pages. They used to have one landing page with CTAs directing readers to sign up for their newsletter and follow them on social. With guidance from the Revenue Development Program and their assigned coach Jeff Sonderman, they created a page for social links and one for newsletters.
In addition to separating their social and newsletter signup pages, they added a newsletter signup CTA that appears at the bottom of every page on their site once a day — it reminds people the newsletter is free and a helpful way to stay informed. That CTA also better serves the user experience because it takes up less of the page. These changes helped drive the 250% increase in newsletter signups.
“It’s clear we’re working with experts keen on understanding each publication’s needs,” said Moujaes when asked about his experience working with the Revenue Development Program team.
Working together to find solutions
“Our experience with Newspack has been very collaborative,” said Moujaes.
In fact, his enthusiastic recommendation prompted Newspack to form a partnership with Everlit, an AI-driven text-to-audio generation tool. The time on page for the inewsource stories that include Everlit audio embeds has increased by 172%.
Overall, Moujaes and the inewsource team have seen exciting results with help from Newspack. “Newspack’s performant CMS created a responsive ecosystem for readers, which contributed to higher engagement metrics in concert with innovative product offerings at inewsource. We’ve increased our returning visitorship by 79% in FY23-24 compared to FY22-23.”
“Newspack is a balance of something that just works out of the box and something customizable,” he said about his experience with the technology.
Newspack’s Revenue Development Program is application-based and open to any current Newspack publisher in the United States. Current publishers can apply for either the Reader Revenue Track or the Newsletter Track. Prospective publishers can get in touch with our sales team to learn more.
