How to retarget a zombie newsletter audience

Retargeting a newsletter audience can feel like trying to revive a zombie. But with care, it can be done.

Anytime you walk into a new role, you have the chance to peer out over a graveyard of abandoned projects, be they newsletters, social media channels or (most likely) podcasts. And if you're there long enough, you have the chance to add your own headstones to the collection. I buried a podcast and a video series at my last role.

But among the fresh earth and weathered stones, the zombies lurk. You know these projects. Maybe it was the last person or even the person before them in the role who had a passion for a food column or felt the need to jump on TikTok. Now those columns, accounts and (can you tell I have a bias?) podcasts are lurching along. They receive an update maybe once a month or maybe even twice a month, if you're lucky, but the engagement numbers are anemic and the subscriber numbers are only ever trending down.

In my new role, I'm coming into a company that's been around for over 150 years, which means my zombies lurk among those ideas buried by my 1880s, 1910s and 1960s counterparts. But some of those zombies may have some life left and an audience worth trying to revive.

It's tough trying to reconnect with and revive an audience. Here's how I'm doing it.

1. Research your companions.

My publication has several automated morning newsletters that have been inoffensive yet also a little boring. Our content management system has limitations with what we can do, but before I could meet with IT, I had my second-in-command start looking at companions — no competitors, I don't want to copy their newsletters. I suggested he subscribe to morning newsletters from other small news outlets around New York State for ideas and come up with some design ideas that would be doable for our small team while working with our content management system

2. Design a product that's both engaging and practical

Especially with newsletters, it's easy to get caught up in the possibilities. What about photos? Could we add charts? How about video embeds?

It all certainly is engaging, but then the practical questions set in. Who will build this every day? What happens if stories come in late? Do we feel confident that this design will deliver something that readers find valuable and worth subscribing to?

We settled on a simple intro at the top of our newsletter with a river of content below. My second-in-command is a walking encyclopedia of the paper and the Capital Region, having been at the paper for over 20 years. He was the natural fit to start writing newsletter copy.

3. Start small when retargeting a newsletter audience

Our main morning newsletter had the largest audience by far. If we had focused on that audience first, we might have had the most to gain — but more importantly, the most to lose. You only get one shot to impress an audience, so before going for the big one, we thought it was better to start with a smaller one and work our way up.

This gives us a chance to make mistakes, work through production issues and find problems we didn't even know existed. Are we still making these potential mistakes in front of a live audience? Well, yes. So we're keeping our new newsletter quiet for two weeks to give time to, as Ms. Frizzle would say, take chances, make mistakes and get messy.

4. Go big once you're sure

After that two-week period, I'm calling in the big guns: marketing. We won't get far reviving the zombie without some marketing power to run some ads and work on retargeting our newsletter audience. With a little firepower behind our new product, we're set to earn back readers and grow a following that trusts us to deliver something they look forward to every morning.