It’s been almost three years since we redesigned TechCabal Daily, our primary newsletter, to excite our audience by making it more readable and informative.
Since December 2020, when TC Daily relaunched, we’ve grown in vision, size and quality. The newsletter now has over 150,000 subscribers—about 10x the number we had in December 2020—a more robust team, and a renewed focus on bringing Africa’s most important tech news to everyone’s inboxes by 7 am WAT every weekday.
Why is it changing?
Since 2020, the team—led by senior editor Timi Odueso—has added a number of new features and functionalities which were not part of the original design.
We’ve added Crypto Market—which is now changing, more on this further on—to provide daily crypto updates, share buttons to help readers share the newsletter with their friends, anchor buttons, language options, and of course ads.
We’ve also received some critical feedback from users, some of whom don’t like our memes—sorry guys, memes are here to stay.
All-in-all, we’ve redesigned TC Daily to create a seamless experience for our readers, clients and ourselves. Or we could say we redesigned to fit “present macroeconomic conditions and realities”.
What’s changing?
Our growth, design and tech teams—led by Stephanie Alozie, Osaz Ehiabhi, Tuntamilore Tawak, and Dare Tunmise—have been hard at work for the past couple months.
Here’s what you can expect with the new TC Daily:
- First, we’re changing platforms from MailerLite to Beehiiv. Beehiiv offers us a lot more flexibility and features that fit in with our overall goals. We can track our audience better with it, and run more tests.
- Like a wedding gown—or a nascent Kenyan startup with significant funding—TC Daily is now mostly white 🤷🏾♂️. We’ve reduced most of the blood-orange #F23204 colour that ran through the padding and most of the newsletter. Our overall design is minimalistic and fluid.
- Over the past three months, we’ve been testing out language options for our Francophone audience and it’s been a huge success with over 40% of clicks attributed to the “Read this in French” button. In the new update, we’re adding an Arabic language option for our North African readers too. So TC Daily will be offered in three languages.
- Share buttons are moving from the bottom of the newsletter to the very top. In the old design, we weren’t making great use of the real estate on the top of the newsletter, but we’ve now optimised the top for functionality. We received feedback from users who said they didn’t get enough prompts to share the newsletter and now, they will. Each edition—and each news blurb—will start off with a small “Share this edition” prompt.
- We’ve also added [content] tags to each of the news blurbs. Every news will be identified by whichever sector it belongs to: fintech, cybercrime, global news, etc. We’re only working with content now, but we may add location tags in the future.
- If you haven’t noticed, “Crypto Market” has now morphed into “The World Wide Web3”. We launched Crypto Market last year, at a time when the crypto world was falling, to help our readers keep up with price trends, spikes and dips. This year though, we have a renewed focus on covering the Web3 space on the continent. We’ll achieve that with “WWW3”—no affiliation with WW1, or WW2. The segment will still cover crypto price changes—including a new 30-day change feature—but you can expect to see more Web3 content and analysis.
- We’ve heard feedback about the anchor buttons and how users should be able to click on the news titles in the lede and get linked to the news. The good news is that this feature works for Apple and Yahoo Mail. The bad is that we haven’t found a workaround for Gmail—web and mobile—users. Google is a tough nut to crack, but we’ll get there.
- On Ads, we’re taking off the “partner content” tags from our ads. Ads will now have a red outline while our everyday ads will have black outlines.
- Penultimately, we are adding at least two new interactive content styles in H2 2023 but we can’t leak the news yet. What we can say is that we’re looking to engage our readers and the tech community more.
And one more thing ☝🏾:
Our referral programme is back!
Last year, we launched V1 of our referral programme to incentivise our readers to share the newsletter. We got hundreds of sign ups within weeks but the system had a few bugs.
We’re happy to announce that we’ve squashed the bugs and now have a more functional referral programme which we’ve tested within the team, and outside of it. Most of this is thanks to Beehiiv which has an in-built referral programme that’s easily customisable (no, this is not an advert, we just really like fun, cool, no-code tools).
What this means is that all of our subscribers can now refer family and friends to TC Daily and win. The premise is simple: if you love TC Daily, tell someone about it, and we’ll give you something in return*. And don’t worry, the gifts will be items you can actually use, like Showmax subscriptions or mobile money.
For now, only subscribers domiciled in Nigeria can redeem their rewards but we’re working to extend to readers in other African countries. (Other terms and conditions here).
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find a unified rewards system that works cross-borders so it’s been a bit difficult to find a system that works across countries like Kenya, South Africa or Uganda where most of our users live. Netflix doesn’t offer gift cards and neither does Jumia.
We are, however, still searching for options. If you have an idea of how we can make this work, please let us know at newsletter@techcabal.com.
We’re super excited for everyone to try out and read TC Daily, and not just because we make money from it 😉. If you’ve stuck with us this long, please sign up for the newsletter if you already haven’t, and share it across your network!
As usual, if you have any feedback, please reach out!
