One year ago, we announced Ph.ly, a locally-minded URL shortener that was also home to an experiment: a weekly email service that promised to share the three biggest, most meaningful journalism stories in Philadelphia. (Update: We ended this experiment in August 2013. Check out the full archive here.)
We called it the Ph.ly/NewsWeekly and after getting a rush of some 1,500 subscribers to start, the service has slowly grown to more than 1,700 weekly subscribers.
Big mistake from my part? The first few weeks I A/B tested by way of keeping the A subject line the same for several weeks. The result was that for a portion of the list early on, Ph.ly ended up in the spam folder. That happens often to new regular lists and we’ve since largely grown out of it, but our strong open rates could likely be even higher.
You can see an archive of the recent newsletters and sign up at Ph.ly/NewsWeekly.
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