How I increased engagement for Yelp's longest-running email newsletter by 77%
Local Yelp case study
How I reduced the level of effort for Yelp’s largest and longest running newsletter by 89% while increasing engagement 77%.
The Local Yelp is an email newsletter that informs readers about great local businesses and events in their city, based on a different theme each week. Think: everything from “your city’s top cheese pizza pulls” to “the lushest secret spots for indoor gardening near you”. It’s Yelp’s longest running email campaign, and it’s where I first got a taste for strategy and creative analysis.
This took a team of 4–6 full-time editors to manage, in addition to the the 130+ individuals who wrote the first round of copy for edits.
Each newsletter was written by a different individual, based in a different city, which lead to inconsistent writing.
And in the absence of a consistent, strong voice, the newsletter had widely varying performance. This case study shows how I turned that around in ~2.5 years.
Historically, this email was a long-form, copy-heavy affair. I used to edit 35+ newsletters way back in the day, complete with basic html editing, and—needless to say—it wasn’t a very scalable process.
Each newsletter was three–five paragraphs long and required heavy editing and QA.
Step 1: Develop a content strategy
Back then: Each Community Manager in each city would decide what topic to write on based on personal preference, seasonality, or perceived trends. This meant hundreds of different topics in any given week.
We created guidance on which topics would work and how to best write subject lines, but managing consistent edits for a team of over 100 different individuals wasn’t working. More meaningful and impactful processes were needed.
Now: I developed an editorial calendar system based on audience research. Each week, all newsletters now have the same theme, based on an optimal set of criteria. Basing content decisions on the audience that reads the email became top priority over personal preference or whim.
My editorial team and I would scour Yelp’s top searched topics month over month and check the fastest rising trends to see what people truly cared about. We would then plan this calendar each quarter, giving enough time for the team to source content ahead of schedule, compose and submit on time, and accommodate last minute changes.
Storytelling became paramount
Given the spread of newsletters across North America, it was crucial to identify topics that were “Goldilocks” themes—not too niche and regional, but not too bland and obvious. And most of all, we wanted to start telling engaging stories with the featured reviews and great businesses on Yelp.
As such, content planning now balances these key needs:
Top search and/or national and seasonal relevance
Prior success metrics
A specific enough story to resonate
Yelp priority messages
Broad enough to meet ranged audience
Broad enough for small cities
Targeted enough for large cities
Step 2: Centralize the copywriting
Then: Hundreds of different individuals, with varying writing ability, writing hundreds of unique newsletters. This resulted in heavy editorial oversight, a high error margin, an indistinguishable brand voice, and hours of editing and proofing work.
Now: All content is written by one copywriter each week, per the editorial content calendar. This enabled us to unify the brand voice, bring stylistic consistency, and elevate the quality of the newsletter.
Step 3: Port the list to Braze
Then: Way back when, a pretty dope engineer built an email platform for Community Managers to send out the Local Yelp newsletter. Here’s the catch—making updates was costly, difficult, and incredibly hard to get support for. This meant design was stuck in the dark ages, the content blocks were unchangeable, and errors were impossible to fix.
Now: I teamed up with an incredible and talented marketing leader to port our list to Braze. This allowed us to make several updates, including:
Improving the design and content flow
Including preview text with subject lines
Cleaning up the list more robustly and efficiently
Accessing more reliable engagement metrics
Better reporting and clean A/B testing
Reducing LOE massively
Needless to say, but important to mention—it takes a team, a passion, and a determination to make changes like these. (So hug a marketer today and make besties.)
Our tiny-but-mighty team included two talented copywriters, two dedicated marketers, and myself—constantly tracking metrics, sharing best practice, and acting as project manager—to implement this overhaul.
Step 4: Agree on goals, KPIs, and a RACI
Sure, this should be step one—but this project has a long and complex history. After several teams became involved, it was clear we needed to address roles and responsibilities to reduce the level of effort. I proposed a RACI, work stream, set of goals, and specific KPIs to satisfy the growing number of teams that relied on this communication.
With nearly 14 years working in-house, I’ve learned heritage projects are tough to evolve. Using the impact as a north star is usually the best way forward to negotiate the RACI and process.
Then: Numerous stakeholders giving conflicting feedback with disparate goals and KPIs.
Now: A balanced RACI and project brief that clearly aligns the content plan to each stakeholder’s needs.
Step 5: Test and learn
Then: With multiple different people writing about multiple different topics at varying skill level, it was impossible to gauge performance. This meant we had no way of determining what might impact open rates, engagement, and unsubs. All we knew were some relatively unreliable metrics.
Now: Pre-Braze we had limited access to testing, due to a dependency on costly engineering. Despite this, we were able to sell in and implement a design test and prove out that updating would have a positive engagement impact. Details on the test are here.
With those results, I was first able to implement the editorial calendar system. (No design update at that stage.) This gave us strong directional learnings for content planning and subject lines. Since the port to Braze, we’re now able to run clean A/B tests to continue to learn.
Headline results
So, what juicy things did we learn in the process? An absolute ton. But the headline results were clear—since 2018, year over year, the newsletter open rates soared, while unsubs and engagement remained steady. We achieved this while reducing the LOE massively, without reducing the volume of send.
Want detailed nuggets? Check out the next blogs for all the content and subject line tidbits.
Level of effort decreased 89%,with no change to volume of send
Open rates increased 77%, with engagement holding steady