Increasing engagement on NYC government newsletters

In 2020–2021, I managed newsletter campaigns for access.nyc.gov to deliver information about social services. I performed A/B tests and achieved:

• open rates up to 58%

• click-to-open rates up to 32.13% (for comparison, Mailchimp's average click-to-open rate for government communications was 22.4% in 2020)
• 71.4% increase to the subscribe rate

Increasing the subscribe rate

The newsletter signup form was formerly located at the bottom of access.nyc.gov. I refreshed the design and moved it higher on the page. I implemented an A/B test to confirm whether my new design would have an impact.

The newsletter got 71.4% more signups during the A/B test over a month-long period. As a result, I worked with developers to implement the new design.

Increasing the click-to-open rate

I A/B tested different layouts and copy adjustments to optimize the click-to-open rate, the percentage of newsletter readers who perform an action (click a CTA).

My interventions increased clickthroughs on certain links by 200% after placing them closer to the top of the newsletter.

I also increased clickthrough rates by 30% simply by indicating how much monetary value a resident can get from programs.