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Designing FontDiscovery Newsletter

Developing Growth-oriented Content

In this post, I want to highlight the process of developing FontDiscovery newsletter, an important content marketing and lead-generation tool for Typogram. FontDiscovery is a weekly newsletter launched before we even had a coded product. It was developed to gain insights about the type of design resource early-stage entrepreneurs prefer, so we can better understand how to create helpful materials for our product.

In this post
typogram svg swirl
  • The Problem → Context & Background
  • Assumptions → Questions We Are Trying to Answer
  • Round 1  → Birth of FontDiscovery • Learnings & Results
  • Round 2  → Expanding into Lead Gen • Learnings & Results
fontDiscovery hero showing font of the week
The Problem
typogram svg swirl

Context/ Background

As we talk to users and validate learning features for our logo design tool, Typogram, I realize we can get a jumpstart building supporters and creating a community around the product. This allows us to learn and easily access our potential users for support and helps us understand what type of design resource users would find helpful.

With these thoughts in mind, we decided to create a design newsletter with a weekly sending schedule - this way, it gives us more exposure to our potential users and allows us to experiment with the format continuously.

Our Assumptions

Assumptions

Questions We Are Trying 
to Answer

  1. What design topics are early-stage entrepreneurs interested in?
  2. What do those materials look like, content-wise?
Sitting on these ideas, we talked to users from our user testing to see if they struggled with specific logo design and branding topics. We also performed a search analysis on platforms like Quora to see what common questions entrepreneurs were asking about branding and design. 

We collected and organized all the questions into marketing, design, typography, and branding categories. Two potential directions for this newsletter emerged: We could develop a broad newsletter covering a wide selection of design topics across different categories or a niche newsletter targeting one specific design topic. 
fontDiscovery search phase
Potential content directions gathered from our research
We decided to tackle the second direction since that offers a more distinctive voice, perfect for raising brand awareness. It also allows us to experiment and expand once we have flow and traction. As for the topic, We targeted the question - “What font should I use for my logo/marketing/blog/website… “ – one of the most popular questions in our research.
Round 1

Birth of FontDiscovery

swirl
After discussions with the team, I decided to anchor the newsletter on a weekly font, and focus the newsletter on three knowledge points we identified that would be of value to our target market:
During the early days of the newsletter, we focused on finding the balance between content, format, and voice. We want to identify a recipe that allows us to write unique and helpful design content that captures our target audience’s interest. Key metrics we focused on were opening rate and subscriber growth rate.
fontDiscovery open rate

Open rate for one of the first issues of FontDiscovery

font of the week in FontDiscovery

The first issues primarily featured a weekly font and explained its history and usage through visual example

Results & Learnings

Round 2

Expanding FontDiscovery into an Integrated Growth Tool

Over the next 12 months, the newsletter had excellent growth and open rate. FontDiscovery had over 2,500 subscribers and was featured on several top websites of our niche, including Product Hunt.

reader feedback fontdiscovery

A happy moment: one of the nicest notes I got from my newsletter reader! : ) 

fontdiscovery open rate
This validated that our current content and format are working. It was time for more integration between the content of our newsletter, the in-app content, and our blog content. We added two new sections: design and color, to create more alignment. We also surveyed our users for ideas on a new section. “Typography Jargon Buster” was then created – it currently is one of the product’s most engaged content on Twitter. 

We started aligning fonts of the week to fonts in our logo design app, funneling content from Typogram’s blog to the design section of the newsletter to build brand awareness. At the same time, we started posting older newsletter issues back to the blog, targeting low-volume keywords of our niche to improve SEO for our website. This brought us about 1.5 - 2k monthly organic traffic. 

The big moment came when we launched the pre-order for the app: our newsletter subscribers were ready to support us, and about 10% of the initial customers came from the newsletters, proving this strategy to be a success.
fontdiscovery archive

FontDiscovery archive on Typogram's blog for SEO

our serif post is ranked no.6 for keyword "serif"

A pround moment: one of the post is ranked 6 on Google for the keyword "serif"

details from typogram's serif post

On the blog, we also feature interactive infographics explaining typography jargons

Results & Learnings