Audience members have the chance to opt-in to further communications with you when submitting questions, votes, or other information through your Hearken embeds. Their participation often represent new opportunities for further engagement.
So what do you do with all that data? How do you make it work for your organization?
Editorial Uses
One-to-one outreach
When you collect emails, you can alert audience members who voted for a response or asked a similar question know that the story is finished on the topic they were curious about. They are likely to want to both read/listen to that story and to share it with their friends, and reaching out to let them know it's ready is a key part of building a meaningful relationship. It's like when a friend gets you the gift you strongly hinted at wanting, and it shows you they were listening.
Events
You can also use your knowledge of people's curiosities to invite them to relevant newsroom events. If you're hosting an event about public transit, you might want to send an invitation to every audience member who's submitted a question about public transit to your newsroom. You could create a list for that segment of your audience and then export their emails to send them an invitation in bulk.
Analysis
Many newsrooms collect zip code information as a custom field in their embeds. If you're a newsroom collecting that information, you can analyze that data and map where audience responses are coming from and if there are any patterns in the types of questions that are being asked. This kind of analysis can help your newsroom determine under-served geographical areas or popular topics by geography.
Business and marketing uses
Newsletters
Unlike Facebook and some other third-party platforms, Hearken allows you to get your audience members' email addresses. This is extremely valuable if you are a news organization that wants to grow your email list, whether that's to build subscribers to a newsletter or to generate more revenue for paid subscriptions or membership. Our partners at Bitch Media found folks who engaged with Hearken were 2-5x more likely to become paying subscribers. That is huge, and something the business, marketing, revenue folks in your newsroom will sit straight up and pay attention to.
Subscriptions or memberships
Email addresses collected through Hearken embeds can also represent leads for subscriptions or membership. You can compare addresses you collect against your existing subscription or membership rolls and create a campaign to get those audience members from passive consumer to paying customer.
Outreach
Additionally, if your organization collects zip code information through custom embed fields, you can compare postal codes of Hearken participants vs. current subscribers or members and create a campaign to create a heat map and outreach campaign to underserved areas.
Success stories
Public radio station WBEZ compared the emails generated from their Hearken-powered stories against their CRM and found those emails were 56% new leads for membership.
Bitch Media tracked the emails of people who engaged through Hearken and found they were 2-to-5-times more likely to convert to paying members than other readers. So many new people became new members during the first year, it ended up covering the cost of Hearken and then much more. Read the case study here.
How do I export emails?
We want to make sure that you're able to get those emails and opt-ins into your CRMs and other services. You have a few options to do so.
Currently, we have an integration available for Mailchimp and are developing others. If you want to connect Hearken to Mailchimp, here's how.
For other CRMs and providers, we have a Weekly CSV Export feature where you can receive a CSV of all the engagement you’ve received in the past week, each Monday. The first time you download it, it will give you all the emails you've ever received from question submission and voting so that you can go and add in those opt-ins, and then going forward, it'll just give you the ones from the past week. If interested, that lives under the Connect Services tab at the top right of your EMS. This makes it easy to input that information in batches into CRMs and services.
You can also download a single CSV of all the names, email addresses and opt-ins submitted through form and poll embeds. It will include a column for the date so you can filter by it, and whether they clicked your opt-in checkbox to sign up for the newsletter. That one lives here under Export Emails.
Reach out to your engagement consultant or support@wearehearken.com with any questions about exporting your data.