Down with pinked-up content
Too often, a news media brand realizes lol oh wait we should make sure we are reaching the womenz seeing as they are half of our potential readership and disappointingly churns out The News, But Girly, so we’re really digging this Nieman Lab interview with the Financial Times’ head of audience engagement, Renée Kaplan, on how she’s making the FT a little less obviously dudely.
One of the new products they’re launching to appeal to that female readership? A newsletter, of course:
“Five stories you shouldn’t miss, curated by a female FT journalist in a conversational tone, fronted by the journalist’s name and her photo. We put together a sample newsletter, four sample issues, and decided to specifically send it to a pool of almost all women, with a small control group of men.
It turned out that not only did it have a significantly higher average open rate than almost all of our other newsletters, and definitely higher with women — we also moved a significant percentage of the women in a not-engaged cohort to an engaged cohort … There was also a happy byproduct: The newsletter was also very effective in engaging disengaged male readers.”
This success came, as Kaplan notes, as a result of NOT resorting to millennial pinkwashing:
“While this product is 100-percent designed and engineered to engage our women subscribers and engage women readers, it is deliberately not flagged as being for or by women. Our internal and external research clearly showed that women do not want “made for women” content. Ironically, our paper is pink, but they consistently said they don’t want pinked-up content.”
All product people out there, pay attention ^^ and don’t abuse the pink.
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