 Hi! It’s Simon.
Has this newsletter had an impact on you this year? Reply to this email and let me know! I'd love to feature you and your work in next week's edition, the last one of 2018.
This week, we're highlighting two tools from a marketer's engagement toolbox.
The first is a local marketing tactic you can use to reach people directly without interference from platforms. It's guaranteed to reach your intended audience and the right call out can convert more than 5 percent of those you reach!
Designing a conversion funnel is the second tool and a topic to which we've previously dedicated an edition of GroundSourced. But it's such an important framework that it's worth a second mention. (Plus that edition came on Thanksgiving eve so you might have missed it!)
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The US Postal Service's direct mailing service
If you're in the US, the postal service's direct mail marketing is a great way to target a geographic community for engagement. Their Every Door Direct Mail portal lets you send mail to every household on a particular postal route and provides additional demographic information about that route, including the how many properties are residences or businesses, the average income of people living on the route, and their age range. For $125, I can reach all 700 people living on my particular postal route.
I learned about this at the People Powered Publishing Conference from Michelle Ferrier, dean of the School of Journalism & Graphic Communication at Florida A&M University. Michelle used EDDM to survey the needs of residents in a community in southeastern Ohio. Their work had a 5-7 percent response rate and required residents to fill out a form and return it in the mail. That's the typical conversion rate for direct mail but there are tactics you can use to increase it, including prompting people to text you with GroundSource!
Find your community on Every Door Direct Mail here. Now how you plan to convert them is another story and that's where funnels come in...
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The funnel and the news business
Funnels are outlines of a community member's journey from passerby to evangelist for your cause. They're a map for you to follow as you engage folks, using strategies to convert people from the top of the funnel to the bottom. From top to bottom, the typical funnel stages are awareness, interest, evaluation, action, and advocacy.
This framework allows you to build community consciously and with an eye towards sustainability. Journalism is rapidly transitioning from ad-based, scale-above-all business models to ones based on more engaged audiences that support the news directly through subscriptions and memberships and funnels play a key role in that.
Read more about funnels and the news business from GroundSource CEO Andrew Haeg here.
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 That's it for this week. GroundSourced is about helping you better connect with your community. Have questions you'd like us to answer? Links to stories or studies you're reading that we can pass on to our 1,000+ subscribers? Let me know with an email to simon@groundsource.co.
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