Welcome to the first Life of Scoop Plus email. Thank you for being a member. My goal is 100x value for the price you pay. I do not take it lightly that you’ve trusted me with your hard-earned treasure. So let’s dive right in.

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Alright. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Today’s Life of Scoop Plus newsletter is a Scoop Labs edition. This is where I walk you through exactly how I did a recent experiment so you can recreate it. Some parts of the experiments may be ongoing.

About two years after starting Naptown Scoop, I started collecting audience data. Once a year, I'd run a demographics survey and put the summary in my media kit. It really helped make sales.

But about a month ago, I realized my data was old and weak. It was 100% anonymous, outdated, and I didn’t have enough. I'd been wondering what I could do with real data for a while. Mostly dreaming about targeting specific readers for advertising clients.

Honestly, I was nervous about trying it. What if people unsubscribed because I asked for so much personal info? What if they thought I'd sell their data? Well about a month ago, I stopped being afraid.

I'm glad I did.

My old method (Method A) involved anonymized data gathered once a year. Maybe. It gave me insights like, "75% of Naptown Scoop readers are women."

My new method (Method B) gives me insights like, "450 of Naptown Scoop's readers earn over $1 million per year and I can run ads for you targetingly only those 450."

This is the story of going from Method A to Method B.

In our welcome email (exact copy of which you can find in the Life of Scoop Plus Members Lounge), we ask, "What's your favorite restaurant in Annapolis." Or at least we did. More on that later.

Over the years, we've had thousands of responses. So we downloaded them all using Google Takeout, uploaded the csv to ChatGPT, and boom. 10 minutes later, we knew the popular common choice.

One weak spot of beehiiv surveys is no logic. So if we asked people if they had children and they said no, the next question still asked how old their kids were. Oh well...

So, here are the exact questions. Prefer not to say is an important option because you don't want people to quit when the survey gets too personal. And it will get personal. You'd be surprised what info people will share.

For ZIP code, include all ZIPs your newsletter covers and one layer outside of that. List the ZIP then town. Makes it easier for folks to find theirs.

You may want to add a question or two if your local newsletter supports a business you own. For example, if you were a realtor, you might want a dedicated question about selling a house. If you’re promoting roofing, you’ll ask the age of their roof.

I was looking for at least 1,000 responses but we ended up blowing that away. We chose a two week period during which we promoted the survey three times. Once you see the CTRs (click through rates), you'll agree we could have done more but I didn't want to bother people.

We sent two versions of the Scoop on this date.

It's casual, transparent, and most importantly, brief. Don't over explain the survey. Introduce it, promise you won't share their info, and get on with it.

This copy achieved a 10% CTR for the survey. It was the first story but because of the intro and ads, it's the third piece of content.

This was about halfway down the newsletter because I wanted to move things around. CTR = 4.1%.

We also segmented out everyone who'd already taken the survey so they weren't seeing the prompt over and over.

This was right in the intro. First thing in the newsletter. It's literally impossible to miss. CTR = 3.57%.

As you can see, CTR was dropping every time. 3.57 is still fantastic and we definitely could have push it at least twice more but we had a good enough response. Plus, I still had something up my sleeve.

Very importantly, I announced the winners publicly without revealing their identity. You have to show people that real people win.

Choosing was easy. I downloaded the survey results from beehiiv, imported the CSV into Google Sheets and counted the rows, then asked ChatGPT for two random numbers in the range. We delivered the gift cards via email. It was easy as pie.

Here's the thing. These days, once annual data pushes aren't enough. Continuous data collection is the name of the game. If you follow my advice, you might never need a two-week push like mine.

Because what you should actually do is promote your demographic survey as soon as people subscribe. Get the data right away.

I'm doing this with the local newsletter I just started. Same exact survey. Here's the welcome email.

That survey has a 14% CTR for new subscribers and a 38% conversion rate. The email itself has a 50% open rate. Translated into real numbers, for every 1,000 new readers...

To be honest, that's not great. It's about a 2% success rate. Naptown Scoop has a 54% success rate with the survey in the welcome email. But Naptown Scoop is much older. The domain is five years old and sends almost half a million emails monthly.

Naptown Scoop also doesn't advertise on Facebook so most new subscribers are referred by friends which comes built-in trust.

But there are some things we can do to improve that number.

And up my other sleeve? Just buy the data.

There are companies out there where you can give them an email address and they'll give you gender, education, marital status, net worth, age, children, income, pets, and more. I got a quote from Full Contact for our 14,000 most engaged subscribers who didn't complete the survey. Plans started at $3,000 per year.

First-party data (collected directly from subscribers) is my survey. Buying it from a place like Full Contact is called third-party data.

First-party is usually more accurate and definitely cheaper. But third-party is better than nothing.

Data tells you what to write about. And what not to write about.

A surprising amount of my readers are interested in government news. I'd always overlooked that. Now we give it more attention.

Only a few are keen on residential real estate. Probably won't start that real estate newsletter I've been brainstorming. That just saved me a lot of time and money.

But it's real power is in advertising.

Imagine this. Right now, Naptown Scoop's financial planner client pays about $40 per thousand opens. For that, they get one ad every two weeks sent to all 22,500 readers. But what if we could send a different ad to each of these groups:

We could tailor each ad to each group. Just based on the increased complexity we'd be able to charge more. But conversion rates would also skyrocket. We'd be able to double or triple the price because we'd be creating so much more value.

This, of course, is hypothetical. Life of Scoop Plus is a lab where ideas are born and tested, not always presented in their final form. And with data on just 8% of our readers, we don't have enough to what I just described. But if we enriched 15,000 of our readers, we definitely could.

Anyone can do steps 1 & 2. To make step 3 worth it, I recommend at least 5,000 subscribers. For step 4, I wouldn’t do it with less than 15,000.

That’s all for now.