We launched Axios in January 2017 based on this shared belief: The world needed smarter, more efficient coverage of the topics shaping the fast-changing world.
We work to get our readers smarter, faster on the topics of import and espouse an audience first approach to everything we do, which includes being respectful of our readers’ inboxes. By taking a smart & judicious approach to email strategy, we provide readers with the stories shaping our world without flooding them with marketing and promotional emails.
Our team restricts marketing activity to ensure it does not come at the expense of user experience or user trust. The aim is to provide users with a positive experience that reduces overall subscriber churn and strengthens newsletter open rates.
We’ve partnered closely with our data analytics and data engineering teams to assess our entire email history to understand user behavior & when engagement is optimal for our readers. Using this data, we make recommendations to our readers to keep them engaged and interested with topics that may be relevant to them, but we stagger and cap the number of recommendations they can receive.
Upticks in marketing email activity increase the likelihood that a subscriber will opt out, so we are very cautious & controlled when it comes to sending marketing emails - there must be a clear business case and it must provide readers with something that will contribute to their subscriber journey.
Given that Axios has several lines of business, this process requires a level-headed approach to marketing and being hyper-aware of what is happening on the readers’ side. We’ve developed a robust & well-documented email calendar to let us defend readers’ time and attention, and to protect them from being spammed by too many emails.
Open rates for our editorial & marketing emails are substantially above the industry benchmark (typically 50% above the industry benchmark, per Campaign Monitor data), which reassures us that our approach to balancing competing interests and placing our audience first leads to strong results.
Our strategy decreases churn & opt-out rates, bolsters our high open rates, and provides our subscribers with a user-friendly experience from the beginning to the end of the subscriber lifecycle. We routinely receive positive reader feedback and have significantly reduced overall monthly subscriber churn.
