Today there are many young professionals who are busy and do not have the time to watch early morning news on TV, read the newspaper or even to listen to the daily news on the radio as they get ready for work. In the best case, some of them try to stay up to date with the latest news relevant to their professional career, but do not have the time to follow the rest of the daily news covered by the media.
Three years ago, Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, two 25 years old “news-nerds” working at NBC, saw this problem and decided to develop their own concept – theSkimm. TheSkimm is a newsletter, aimed at giving an easy access to a brief summary of the daily headlines to its subscribers.
As you may see, the concept of theSkimm is not a breakthrough innovation as it is basically a daily Newsletter sent via email. Though, this newsletter now counts more than 1.5 million subscribers and enjoys an opening rate of 45% which outpaced the average industry opening rate of 18.8% (MailChimp). Last year only, theSkimms raised 6.25 millions from a variety of investors.
So what is so special about this newsletter and how did they achieve such an growth within such a small period of time?
First of all, Weisber and Zakin chose to write in a different tone from the one you could expect from any information driven media. The tone they chose is the one of a knowledgeable friend summarizing some information in a very informal manner, using terms that are easy to understand and therefore keeping the attention of the reader. As Leah Chernikoff pointed out, a good example of this catchy modern writing style could be the way they depicted Khorasan as “the Super Mario All-Stars of al-Qaeda.”
Further, Weisber and Zakin managed a very thorough development of their network, even though they didn’t have any business background to rely upon.
The two entrepreneurs defined precisely their target audience, the young and busy active women. This has allowed them to focus on this audience specifically and to gain some in-depth knowledge about them. Also, this was pretty natural to them as most of their friends, colleagues and even themselves were part of this segment. It was therefore easier for them to know what was expected from the “Skimmers”.
Another smart move has been the choice of using emails as the mean of communication of their newsletters over trying to develop an app or a website. At the early stage of the development, as they were trying to raise funds, the two entrepreneurs met investors who told them that Emails was an outdated way to communicate with people. But the two women knew their target audience well enough and knew that checking emails is a morning routine to all of them. Therefore they decided to stick to their choice, convinced that email was the best solution to reach their target audience attention and to integrate their daily routine. Seeing the fast growth of theSkimms, we might agree that this choice was certainly the right one to make.
In order to attract the maximum amount of subscribers possible, Weisber and Zakin also chose to implement a referral program. By sharing a personal URL address to your friends and having ten of them to subscribe via this link, you will become a Skimm’bassador. Through this referral program, you will receive invitations to parties as well as receive prizes. TheSkimm attributes 10% of its signups to their 6,000 Skimm’bassadors.
Lastly, we could think that after reaching millions of people, Weisber and Zakin would not be involved in the writing of theSkimms articles anymore while in fact they decided to watch over every article published and they even “still touch every word.”.
Because of the way they enabled their service to introduce their well targeted audience everyday life routine and their style of writing news, theSkimms found a way to modernize the news industry and to renovate the newsletter service.
Here’s my personal URL, http://www.theskimm.com/?r=d0723a3d
feel free to subscribe and to make me a Skimm’bassador !
References
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-skimms-danielle-weisberg-and-carly-zakin-interview-2015-7
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/17/smallbusiness/the-skimm/
http://www.racked.com/2014/11/13/7569323/the-skimm-carly-zakin-danielle-weisberg
http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQQQ5vB5TAI
http://www.inc.com/jeremy-goldman/how-the-the-skimm-s-founders-built-a-tribe-of-loyalists.html
http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a14566/the-skimm/
