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Trident United Way is a catalyst for measurable community transformation in in education, financial stability, and health in the Lowcountry. For 20 years, Trident United Way has hosted Days of Caring, the largest day of community service in the Tri-County area. Jeannine Nash, Administrative Assistant, recalls the first Days of Caring in 2001, when The Post and Courier volunteered to help at The Florence Crittenton House for at-risk young women. “It was a good feeling knowing that we were helping those in need, and I remember how appreciative they were of our help.” Since then, The Post and Courier employees have participated in Days of Caring each year, helping numerous non-profits and centers across The Lowcountry.

This year, The Post and Courier volunteered to help The Navigation Center. The Navigation Center serves individuals and families experiencing homelessness by connecting them to services and housing. We were tasked with repainting the building exterior. Our 16 volunteers picked up our brushes and paint buckets, and by the afternoon, the task was completed. The goal was to make all who come to the center feel welcome, and giving the exterior some love certainly made a difference. Matt Ojala, Deputy Director of The City of Charleston Department of Housing and Community Development, wrote a note when he saw the completed project:

“Thank you and your team for all your hard work today. You all did a tremendous job. When I swung back by The Navigation Center this afternoon everyone I spoke to were singing the praises of The Post and Courier.”

THANK YOU to all of our volunteers, including Jake Buck, Daniella Fisher, Andrew Fleet, Reid Griffin, Jocelyn Grzeszczak, Alex Kellner, Grace Lardear, Stephen Massar, Amos McCoy, Abby Prokop, Emilio Santana, Debbie Sledziona, Libby Stanford, Amy Sutton, Elizabeth Wassynger, and Shannon Warnecke!

***blog post written by Claire Linney

Apple’s iOS 15 email privacy updates are revolutionizing how email marketers pull data. Data allows us to figure out what’s working and what’s not. With the new updates, email open rates will be impacted in a big way. We talked about what this iOS email privacy update is, but how can you adjust Your Email Marketing Strategy to fit this new change?

One

With the unreliability of open rates, it’s time to revaluate which email marketing metrics you focus on. Opens and clicks no longer hold the power they once did. Email clicks hold more weight than they used to. Consider focusing on the conversion rate, list growth rate, overall ROI, click rate, and the number of emails being forwarded and shared.

1. Conversion rate: the number of conversions (a specific action such as sales) divided by the total number of visitors
2. List growth rate: the rate at which you’re gaining new subscribers versus contacts unsubscribing
3. Overall ROI: the amount of money earned for every dollar invested in email marketing
4. Click rate: the percentage of recipients who click a link in your email
5. Forwarding/sharing: how often recipients forward or share an email, expanding campaign reach

At the end of the day, the most integral part of strategy is relying on metrics that drive your central business goals. Alignment is key.

Two

It’s time to revamp the triggers in your automated email series. Stray away from triggers related to open rates. Set triggers around whether someone clicks a certain link, time-focused triggers, date-focused triggers, and triggers driven by ecommerce, perhaps someone leaves a full cart at checkout.

Three

With MPP, you don’t know how many people are opening your emails. But, it’s critical that your emails are opened! Now is as good a time as ever to re-focus on engaging email subscribers.

Email subject lines are the first thing a consumer reads when deciding to open an email or click delete. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. If you were reading the email, what would make you click? 

Consider the contact sender’s name in the from section of your newsletters. This needs to be a name that consumers know and trust. Following subject lines, preheaders (words that show in an email preview) are an important email component. Preheaders are a great location for a call to action.

Four

Since we’re shifting from email open rates to click rates for measuring engagement, it’s important to create content that makes consumers click. As a general rule of thumb, don’t include your most valuable content in an email. Leave readers with a curiosity gap to click through to your website.

Five

To get the most out of your emails, add interactive elements to engage subscribers. Polls and surveys invite your consumer to contribute to the conversation.

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, know that there will be more changes to come. Being able to pivot and adapt your strategy over time is one the strongest tool in your email marketing toolkit.  

Apple’s iOS 15 email privacy updates are revolutionizing how email marketers pull data. Data allows us to figure out what’s working and what’s not. With the new updates, email open rates will be impacted in a big way.

There’s no need to panic, but it’s important to understand how the new update will influence your email marketing strategy. Apple’s privacy updates apply to their infamous Mail app and impact data regardless of your preferred email marketing platform. Open rates and location data are the main data sources affected.

Email Privacy Protection

As Apple cracks down on its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) options, consumers have the choice of withholding whether they do or don’t open their emails (open rates). For email marketers, this means we have less data to analyze the habits of our audience.

Announced in June 2021, Apple upgraded their privacy settings with the release of iOS 15, making it easier for iPhone users to regulate the use of their personal data. MPP protects data from third parties and hides IP addresses, preventing the linkage of online activity to determine a user’s location. This feature is active on Apple’s Mail app for the iPhone, iPad, Apple watch, and Mac computers, after users have opted in.

Previously, data was sent over from an email immediately when opened by the recipient. The data detailed whether the email was opened, on what device, and often the recipient’s location. The key takeaway, email open rates are no longer a reliable email performance metric.

Why It’s Important

Apple Mail is the default mail application for all Apple devices and accounts for 52% of all email opens, according to Litmus. Apple rolled out MPP for all Apple Mail users on September 20, 2021. Nine times out of 10, consumers will opt to protect their privacy.

Email features you may have relied on previously could be impacted due to inaccurate email open data. One example entails auto-sending a follow-up email to a recipient who didn’t open your initial email.

If 52% of your email list uses Apple Mail, it’s projected that 96% of them will elect to employ the MPP feature. Thus, half of your current email subscribers will skew email open rate data, making this an utterly unreliable metric. You can expect to see your open rates increase.

How Your Email Marketing Strategy Is Affected

Regardless of your preferred email platform, MPP will impact the email marketing industry as a whole. You can expect your email open rates to increase as a result of Apple automatically marking emails as opened on behalf of their users. But, open rates are no longer dependable as a key performance metric.

A click-to-open rate (CTOR) contrasts the number of unique clicks to unique opens, indicating an email’s effectiveness and ability to get consumers to click. CTOR is a result of email opens, so MPP will cause your CTOR rates to drop drastically. But, MPP won’t impact total clicks.

Previously, audience engagement was determined by how often recipients opened your emails. But, you’re likely to see an abnormally large surge of audience members with high engagement.

Open rates play a part in the segmentation of an email list, ranking subscribers from maximum to least engagement, again based on how often subscribers open emails. Rather than basing email segmentation off how often contacts open your emails, base it off of how often subscribers click links within your emails.

Some email platforms, HubSpot included, can set up an automated email series, which will trigger depending on whether or not a user opened an earlier email. Since Apple Mail records an artificial open rate, you may consider using an email click as a trigger in an automated email series.

Traditionally, A/B subject line testing functions on open rates when two versions of the same email are deployed to a small section of your contact list, complete with two differing subject lines. The subject line with the higher open rate is regarded as more effective, but it’s now unreliable with Apple’s MPP update. Consider basing A/B testing around click rates.

As privacy regulations increase, marketers will have less access to consumers’ personal data and habits. With artificial open rates, we won’t know the time an email was opened, the device an email was opened on, and the geographical location in which the email was opened.

Despite Apple’s MPP update, email continues to have the highest ROI, generating $42 for every $1 spent, out of all marketing channels. At the end of the day, the overarching goal of email marketing is to drive sales and increase the bottom line while targeting new customers and sustaining engagement with your current email list.

(Charleston, S.C.) The Post and Courier has recently published a special report detailing how the melting ice in Greenland is effecting the South Carolina Lowcountry, from rising seas to heavier rains. Projects Reporter Tony Bartelme and Photojournalist Lauren Petracca traveled to Greenland to research and cover this story as a part of the newspapers deep dive into climate issues facing the state.

Bartelme and Petracca worked with Josh Willis, a climate scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and head of the Oceans Melting Greenland project. Willis has been researching the oceans effect on the ice in Greenland for the past six years, and through this research has discovered that glaciers are even more threatened than once previously thought. Approximately 280 Billion tons of the massive ice sheet in Greenland melts into the ocean every year and about 15% of Charleston’s rising sea level can be connected to this melting ice.

Bartelme, who also reported on The Post and Courier’s Rising Waters, an in-depth series on the increased flooding in the Charleston area said, “We explored one of the most important stories that hardly anyone is talking about – how melting ice in Greenland affects the gravitational pull on oceans. This has a direct effect on sea levels in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where every inch of sea rise matters.”

Executive Editor of The Post and Courier, Autumn Phillips added, “The Greenland Connection is a huge, creative swing to show how something happening half a globe away is changing things for us. The storytelling by Bartelme and the visuals by Petracca will capture your imagination – transporting readers while also making them think.”

The Greenland Connection was made possible by generous support from the Pulitzer Center, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and The Post and Courier Public Service and Investigative Reporting Fund. The story was made available online to subscribers on Sept. 17, 2021, and will be available in print on Sept. 19, 2021. The story is available online here.

The Post and Courier is a privately held, family-owned media company headquartered in Charleston, S.C. In keeping with its proud history, The Post and Courier is dedicated to serving its customers, employees, and communities with unconditional integrity, and promises to deliver the highest standards of service and impactful, solutions-based journalism

Digital Readiness: What does it mean and why is it important?

Technology is constantly changing and advancing. How many times a year do you see a commercial for the next generation of the iPhone? As technolo­gy progresses, the adop­tion of new technologies is uneven. For example, in a world of iPhone and androids, the flip phone still exists. For an individual to adapt to new technology they must learn how to use it and trust it. This is an example of digital readiness. Are people pre­pared to adapt to changes in technology and how will that adaption happen?

In the media world, the segment we are fo­cused on for digital readiness is our print sub­scribers. Print subscribers are some of our most habitual readers. Imagine thousands of people across our commu­nity spending their mornings reading the paper front to back with a cup of coffee. The ques­tion is, how many of those readers follow our news throughout the day with our digi­tal platforms? Did you know that our print subscriptions include access to our web­site, E-Paper, and mobile app? Our goal is to bridge the gap of print only readers and digital readers by helping our print readers become “digital ready.”

The first thing to consider for print subscrib­er digital readiness is to make sure this group of people are comfortable with navigating the digital space. The recommended place to start is introducing the group to our E-Paper. The E-Paper is a digital replica of the printed product and an effective tool for digital read­iness. We offer classes and webinars to teach people how to log-in and activate their digital subscriptions to use the E-Paper. The second thing to consider is building trust with our print subscribers to engage with our digital. Print readers place emphasis on the feeling of com­pletion. When you read the paper front to back, you are up to speed on all you need to know in news for the day. To gain trust with our readers digitally, we can show how our digital products can give that feeling of completion, and addi­tionally keep them up to date through­out the day.

Digital readiness is important be­cause we can focus on helping our print readers maximize their subscriptions and access all the content available to them. We can also learn more about those readers based on their digital habits, and create a better experience for them as a whole.

****This article was written by Associate Director of Audience Growth, Claire Linney******

The Post and Courier has a new home! Effective September 1, 2021, The Post and Courier’s business offices, newsroom, advertising, marketing, and customer service departments will move to our new location at 148 Williman Street, Charleston, SC.

This move reflects our growing business and incredible support from advertisers like you!

Read more about our exciting move here.

August was an important month for all of us at The Post and Courier. From moving to a brand new office to celebrating the legacy of Mitch Pugh’s time here while welcoming Autumn Phillips into the Executive Editor role, we also hit a major (digital) milestone. We are now have more than 20,000 digital subscribers, so we’d like to share how we got here.

As of January 2016, we had just 1,027 digital subscriptions. And, one year later, we started working with the Pointer Project. From the beginning, we focused on growing our digital audience, both as a new growth and to activate our print subscribers digitally.  Between 2017 and January of 2020, we grew only by about 2,000 digital subscribers a year. Then, we were about to see some big change coming our way.

In 2020 we had several major changes that helped accelerate our growth, the first was our participation in the Facebook Accelerator program. This gave us coaches and a cohort to learn from and share ideas. The second was the addition of Stephanie Dill, our Digital Marketing Manager, who came on board in February of 2020. In January of 2020, for reference, we reported 7,814 digital subscriptions.

With the addition of a dedicated marketing person, the digital subscriber team was able to create engaging and unique content, harness the strong journalism content to attract an audience, foster the subscriber relationships we already had plus create a retention campaign, and encourage new conversions by way of newsletters, social media, contests, and events. Once in place, the Digital Subscription Team has worked closely with various departments to monitor our digital subscription growth and to constantly work towards the goal of getting The Post and Courier in as many hands as possible across the state. Today, that number exceeds 20,000.

We gather potential subscribers in a number of ways. One of the highest converters is our free newsletters throughout each of our markets based on various news topics of interest and frequencies. Not only do we get a good idea of what our readers are interested in, we also have a chance to encourage a reader to become a paid subscriber. Our highest converting newsletters are historically Business, Food, and Politics. We also include opt-ins on every event we host as well as in recap emails to attendees based on the topic.

Another way we encourage new opt-ins (and, of course, subscriptions) is through contests. With a special focus on our expansion markets, a contest allows us to give away a memorable prize but also encourages opt-ins to various newsletters depending on what we’d like to promote by market. For example, just this summer we ran a very popular statewide contest for a Grilling Bundle which earned us a combined 2,865 opt-ins to our newsletters. By gathering as many opt-ins as possible, we fill our marketing funnels with potential subscribers and can target them based on what we know they enjoy.

In addition, refining our social media by providing tracking and costs as well as taking on our lead gen process to encourage signups to newsletters across South Carolina has been another huge boost to our opt-ins and overall conversions.

We worked to create an onboarding plan that both informs and invites new subscribers to make the most of their subscriptions. By knowing the endless access and various benefits from contests to subscriber-exclusive events, each subscriber is immediately aware and focused on the value they receive and why their support matters.

Combining these efforts with truly intriguing creativity and being flexible to make changes has been helpful to the overall process of attracting and retaining subscribers.

Our biggest (and most successful) project launched earlier this summer. In June, we started marketing the $4 for 4 campaign through ads, social media, and email blasts. This ongoing collaborative project with the Newsroom, Development, Customer Service and Marketing helped to offer new readers and those readers who had not yet subscribed an all-access glimpse at our award-winning coverage. This campaign continues to be a success and certainly helped to propel our digital subscriptions to 20k. To date, 5,077 people have subscribed from the offer with only 3% churned or due to expire so far.

Thanks in large part to our expansion markets, we have seen incredible subscription numbers across the state.

Now that we’ve exceeded 20,000 digital subscriptions, we continue to move forward. We look ahead to retaining our $4 for 4-month subscribers and continuing to grow our audience. This is no small feat and takes a true team effort from all of us at The Post and Courier.

*****This article was written by Subscriber and Donor Engagement Specialist, Mary Fox*****