Pinning For Your Newsletter
Daily newsletters drive a huge chunk of our traffic.
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Why is email important? It's a direct pipeline to our most loyal users. There is no middleman — such as Facebook, Google or a news app — in between the user and Patch. From a revenue perspective, we monetize both the newsletter view and the page view.
We not only want to win over new subscribers, but then we want to keep them.
To accomplish that, we make our email as valuable as it can be by:
programming strong LOCAL newsletters
writing compelling lead newsletter headlines every day
sending vital, valuable LOCAL and LOCAL INTEREST news alerts with speed and urgency (more on that in a bit)
front-loading subject lines for news alerts with clickable keywords
being judicious in the number of emails we send every day to avoid annoying the recipient
The Pinner is Patch-built and maintained. It enables editors to select their top stories for inclusion in their sites’ daily newsletters, and send out instantaneous news alerts.
Like the front page of the newspaper chucked at the end of your driveway each day, the newsletters feature our top stories and items from the site.
Two things to remember, before we get to the nuts and bolts:
You have to log into the pinner separately from MyPatch.
It’s a two-step process (don’t worry we’re going to walk you through it!)
First, you’ll need to log into the pinner, which is found at pin.patch.com. You received personal login information in your welcome email, but FIRST! This pop-up screen on the right:
At this screen, you enter “pin” as both the username and password.
Then you will see this screen, where you will enter your personal login credentials.
Now you’re logged in! To pin an individual site’s newsletter, select “Pin A Patch,” and type in your town name.
Your screen will now show that town's name and grid showing what's "pinned" to that specific Patch site.
Items that appear in green, were created on that specific Patch. Items in red come from a neighboring Patch.
To move a recent local article to the top of your page and into a newsletter slot, click on the blue headline under "Most Recent.”
Your selected article headline will appear at the top of the page. Click on the button that reads "Yes! This is the correct article."
Then click “Add pin,” but before you do that, you can adjust the timeframe the article will be pinned and remain in your newsletter lineup. The default is 24 hours, but you can pin something longer or shorter.
The article then will move into a grid labeled "Current Top Stories." And see those little crosshairs in the sort column on the left side of the grid? You can move stories to re-order them, to design your "front page" exactly as you would like. The order of items is reflected on your Patch's homepage. You can pin as many items as you like, keeping in mind that the newsletter will pull in the top 5.
The Basics Of Pinning
Pinning To Multiple Patches
Next: "News Alerts"
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