Email is a fantastic content marketing tool. The New York Times (and Toast Studio) knows this.

Email is sometimes seen by some as an old-school tactic. Something that came before social media, Medium, LinkedIn, native advertising and blogs.

It is, but it remains an extremely powerful tool in your content marketing toolbox.

On what other platforms can you actually send content to a single person? Tools now even allow you to personalize the content for each member (something I am not leveraging in my series).

The New York Times uses email marketing by creating dozens of newsletters, each with their own theme or subject matter. Their most recent trend has been to produce very niche newsletters that have this very personal feel to it (there’s one about columnist Nicholas Kristof for example).

And the results are there. One some editions, they can get a 70% gross open rate, which is the total number of emails opened divided by the number of subscribers (the NYT wouldn’t share unique open rates). I’m happy to share that Toast Studio’s newsletter gets a 75% gross open rates on average.

This is a testament that if you send useful and relevant content to your audience, they will thank you for it. Case in point, a NYT newsletter subscriber is twice as likely to become a paid subscriber to the Times.

And beyond the results of sending those emails, the list of addresses collected is also very valuable data. It can be used multiple ways, in building retargeting lists in your programmatic media buys for example.

How are you using email in your marketing mix? Want to explore how to make better use of it? Send us a quick email to [email protected] or give us a call and let’s explore this together.

In the meantime, take a couple minutes to read this Digiday article, a link my fiancee sent me last week (that’s what happens when both spouses work in the same industry) about how the New York Times is leveraging emails in their marketing and content distribution initiatives.