PennyPlus Newsletter

Content Design + Strategy

The Penny Hoarder explored rebranding as PennyPlus and needed to craft a new identity — including voice, tone, and messaging — to better reflect the company’s evolving offering. The site’s daily newsletter, which had seen subscriptions and sponsors slipping, became the ideal platform to take to the next level with a new content design and strategy.

Context

The Penny Hoarder sent out five different newsletters to more than 420,000 subscribers but during the past few quarters saw three worrying trends:

• 📉 A steady decline in newsletter subscriptions

• ↘️ Dwindling numbers of conversions, retention, and affiliate sponsorships

• 🔺 Increasing competition from newcomers like FinanceBuzz

As part of a larger initiative to reposition and rebrand the company to PennyPlus, the Business and Product Design teams decided to use the newsletter as a test run for the new brand strategy and communications with readers and sponsors.

Roles & Input

Content Designer, UX researcher, Product Designer

• Run a complete newsletter audit, looking at:

  • organic and paid content

  • visual style

  • key messages and values in use

  • brand voice

• Identify and analyze PennyPlus’s audiences

• Research competitors, to identify overlaps and potential differentiators

• Map findings to business proposition and goals

• Create new brand messaging and voice

• Construct a modular content system to provide narrative structure and variation

• Collaborate with multiple stakeholders for feedback

• Partner with editors, UX researchers, product managers, and designers to create the newsletter prototype

Stakeholders

To deliver this project, I teamed up closely with:

• Editorial, UX Research, Product Design, Newsletter Marketing

• Multiple stakeholders from across Product Management

• Company leadership

Starting with personas, competitors, values

I started the project by diving deep into key areas that would inform our new brand and content strategy:

• PennyPlus’s user personas (B2C, B2B) and their needs and expectations

• The competitor landscape

• PennyPlus’s personality, values, and mission

FIX THIS

Understanding newsletter readers

To start, we realized we needed to better understand:

• Who our newsletter readers were — our demographics were outdated

• How readers were reacting to the current newsletter design, and

• What readers wanted — and didn’t want — in their inboxes

As part of an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, we worked closely with Clearlink’s UX research team to solicit feedback about the newsletter experience. Here’s what we learned from 4,592 completed responses:

Key Findings

We were surprised to learn that TPH’s newsletter audience was far older and harder hit economically than we had imagined:

• 👵 Readers were mostly women (73%) over the age of 55 (37% over age 65)

• 💸 60% earned $70,000 a year or less; more than a third worked full-time

Satisfaction OK but many complaints about content

A majority of readers said they were “satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with newsletter content and 55% felt content was “usually” timely, fresh, and relevant. Positive, yes, but not a ringing, enthusiastic endorsement.

In fact, although positive comments outnumbered not-so-positive 43% to 15%, there were a significant number of complaints about newsletter content:

• ☹️ More than two dozen comments about “repetitive” articles

• 😡 Outrage at the constant promotion of gambling-type apps as a way to “make extra money”

Empathizing with struggling seniors

Following up on the survey, we interviewed a handful of subscribers to better empathize with readers' financial struggles and issues.

“I read [the newsletter] for ways to help make ends meet. It’s hard! We need some help here.”

—Agnes J., 67, subscriber

Defining the problem with the newsletter

How might we replace repetitive, stale content with a variety of engaging, practical help?

Drawing on and synthesizing our initial research, we created a primary persona to help us empathize with our readers’ needs and frustrations.

💥 Pain points — repetitive content, everything ads, not interesting

We came to realize — our users needed our help and wanted to trust our content. They weren’t on our site to click links; they were here to get info.

User research helped us focus our design analysis on a hard truth:

• TPH’s newsletters were visually and editorially stale, with identical layouts and story types, day after day

• The articles presented were not as helpful as readers would like

🍎🍊 Comparing competitor newsletters — more scannable, more diverse

We looked at nearly a dozen competing personal finance newsletters — like Morning Brew, Finance Buzz, Finimize, and others. Several trends became clear:

• Widespread use of the Smart Brevity concept among competitors

  • short, scannable chunks of text

  • punchy, meaningful writing

  • use of emojis and graphics to add visual diversity

• More diverse content — a mix of text, short lists, graphics, video

• Best newsletters give readers reasons to return — e.g. Morning Brew’s stock ticker, puzzles

• All content is written primarily to inform, rather than sell or drive clicks, even sponsored content

Synthesizing our research and analysis we landed on three key insights that would drive the design going forward.

🔥 Key Insights

More practical help, more variety, more engaging visuals, and a need to build all this into the process

• Insight #1 — TPH readers are asking for practical help as they are economically struggling; they want information

• Insight #2 — TPH readers want more diverse, engaging content

• Insight #3 — TPH’s newsletter has too much repetitive content, but creating a diverse package daily for the TPH editorial team is a serious challenge — diversity needs to be built into the process and structure to help the team.

📝 Solutions — content strategy and 🎨 design ideas to help and inspire

Building on those insights, I facilitated a design workshop and brainstorming sessions with stakeholders. From the ideas we came up with — and adapting some of the better design patterns from our competitors — I started sketching and then quickly wireframing in Balsamiq, focusing designs on our readers’ pain points.

Shorter, scannable, more engaging

Our solutions embraced both content changes and design changes:

• The newsletter should be diverse — create a flexible, modular system that mixes a variety of content and visuals

• Editorial content should be shorter, scannable, more helpful

• Stories should inform more, tease less

• At least 3 links should be visible above the fold in case readers don’t scroll

Modules

Thematic modules with grouped story links would be interspersed throughout the newsletter, alternating by day. The modules would:

• Build diversity into the structure by breaking up text

• Add coherence and flow to the newsletter by organizing links

• Create conversion opportunities and

• Afford readers helpful information around a topic

Sponsored content — more helpful

We determined that affiliate (sponsored) content should be:

• Clearly marked as sponsored

• Written more like helpful stories, rather than ads

• Designed to be engaging and informative; and

• Have a prominent call to action button

Videos and graphics —getting readers to return

Unlike many of its newsletter competitors, TPH creates its own exclusive video and interactive graphic content, often quite practical and helpful. Just what our readers wanted.

But the current newsletter wasn’t leveraging these advantages. We wanted to give readers good reasons to keep subscribing by offering exclusive interactive graphics and video.

• Add a regular “Chart of the Week”-type section highlighting a topical interactive graphic, like national gas prices

• Add regular, entertaining videos focused on practical issues, like this review of gas station coffee

🧪 Testing prototypes with newsletter readers

With some simple wireframes, I created and tested a low-fidelity prototype with a handful of “super users” from TPH’s Community online chatroom to determine whether we were on the right track.

Results validated our initial concept and were positive overall. And from the suggestions we got, we iterated changes to the design.

Interactive prototype

From wireframes, I created mockups and an interactive, high-fidelity prototype in Figma designed for mobile to test with current TPH newsletter readers.

In our initial test, we ran an unmoderated session with 8 newsletter readers on Maze. Our questions were split between qualitative (satisfaction) and quantitative (conversions) metrics. Following our test, we iterated on the design and tested it with another group of readers.

🎉 Results

👏 Satisfaction doubles

Surveying readers after testing we found the number who were “very satisfied” with newsletter content doubled to 34%. Now more than three-quarters of respondents were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with the design, up 20%.

Readers said they were enthusiastic about our new design:

“So much better! More realistic articles. . . Not the same thing over and over.“
—Angie P.

“Love this! Greatly appreciate the improved quality. The video is fun.“
—Andrew H.

📈 Triple the conversion opportunities

The new design provided triple the number of opportunities for readers to convert:

• ❌ The old newsletter design provided 8 links, on average, with 0 above the fold on mobile

• ✅ the new design offered an average of 24 links with at least 3 above the fold

🔥 Key Takeaways

🔊 Listen to our users — User research revealed many readers desired more practical, helpful information over uncritical advertising. By understanding readers we were able to focus on structural and content problems to address.

🏡 Give readers a home — Readers wanted practical information, and reasons to return to the newsletter. Providing more practical information in articles —— as well as visual content like graphics and video — gave readers a more engaging experience.

🧪 Early-stage testing — Before spending a lot of time on high-fidelity prototypes (much less development), quick testing with readers gave us the confidence to back up decisions with real data.

🛠️ Toolstack

• Figma — design

• FigJam — workshops/whiteboarding

• Balsamiq — early wireframing

• Maze — unmoderated user-testing

• Google Slides — stakeholder presentation

• Slack — communication with users

• Zoom — communication

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