The Little Email That Could

Fore & Aft was Northwest Yachting’s monthly (sometimes bi-weekly) e-mail platform, administered through MailChimp.

From February of 2016, I was tasked with remaking and managing Fore & Aft, determining 100% of the content, writing all of the copy, monitoring the lists, and staging promotions to increase the reach and size of the lists.

At the time the email was quite basic and the open rate was around 18%. The overall CTR around 5%. There were no paid advertisers, as there had been no prior plan at Northwest Yachting to sell digital space on an email platform.

My task was to take this existing “nice to have” extra and turn it into something that generated good audience engagement, fed web traffic, and which could be sold against. Through a combination of a major redesign, A/B testing, and monitoring story performance through Facebook stats and Google Analytics, the I was able to craft content that really resonated with the target audience.

In 2019, some editions of Fore & Aft had a 34% open rate and a 14% overall CTR, with advertisers sometimes getting as high as 2-3% CTR. Through giveaways, promotions, and social media interaction, list size grew by 230% between 2016 and 2019.

One of the goals with Fore & Aft was to blend the right amount of user-oriented content to match the requisite advertising – a ratio not unlike the editorial to print ratio in a printed publication. If users want to read, they’ll scroll and click. If you bombard them with ads up front, you’ll lose them.

It was also specifically designed to be simple – to cost no more than 45-60 minutes a month to produce and to be Outlook-friendly as we had a large number of Outlook subscribers.

Once the audience statistics were well established, the sales staff were able to monetize the setup as more than a “value add” alongside print advertising.

Fore & Aft also helped drive web traffic, hitting users who would only periodically visit the website and delivering them very reliably.