Why The Telegraph thinks retiring some newsletters will actually help grow subscriptions

By Sara Guaglione

British publisher The Telegraph is betting that offering fewer, more focused newsletters will actually help grow the number of subscribers to them.

The media org is striking at an opportune time: The Telegraph reached 500,000 paid digital subscribers in October — up 30% since the start of the year. Already, the publisher used engagement rates, among other factors, to inform sunsetting about a half dozen newsletters and consolidating others due to “underperformance,” said Dan Silver, The Telegraph’s director of email and newsroom innovation.

“Newsletters can have a shelf life. It’s fine to unsubscribe to one newsletter and sign up for another newsletter. We have a very fluid attitude to these editorial properties,” Silver said. “Newsletters are easy to get out, on the ground, and test new concepts.”

The Telegraph also tracked newsletter readers’ habits and found overlaps among audiences and topics, such as Letter from the USA and Letter from the Middle East — foreign dispatch newsletters — that were combined into one global newsletter called The Dispatches. Elsewhere, three rugby newsletters were condensed into one.

Media organizations are increasingly turning to newsletters as of late to develop a habitual relationship with readers to receive and open emails from a publisher at a regular cadence, build a loyal audience to a newsletter product, drive additional traffic to its website and content via links in a newsletter and offer additional value to subscribers — all while growing newsletter sponsorship advertising revenue.

The Telegraph still has a significant amount of newsletters — more than 40 editorial newsletters (meaning not those sent by marketing); eight of which are exclusive to paid subscribers. Silver would not say how many total newsletter subscribers The Telegraph, but a company spokesperson noted that 300,000 readers are signed up to receive its flagship twice-daily Front Page briefing. In all, the publisher sent 800 million editorial newsletter emails to its readers in 2020, Silver said. Revenue from newsletters has increased 81% year to date, and are priced individually based on the open rate of each newsletter, according to a Telegraph spokesperson, who declined to share its newsletters’ average open rate. Depending on the frequency of the newsletter, sponsorship opportunities can run weekly, fortnightly or monthly. The spokesperson did not provide rates.

“We are seeing in a lot of newsrooms the newsletter explosion… but oftentimes it’s a product without a strategy,” said Mary Walter-Brown, the founder and CEO of the News Revenue Hub, which assists over 70 newsrooms with fundraising business models. It’s important to “have a product strategy roadmap for every newsletter that you have, and a strong understanding of success and what that looks like… so you can pivot if you’re not hitting the mark,” she said.

One metric to rule them all

The Telegraph has a unique way of measuring the success of its newsletters. It uses an internal scoring system called Newsletter-STARS (or N*). The system was borne from a newsroom metric called Single Telegraph Acquisition and Retention Score that was introduced by Silver in 2019 to “codify the role that …read more

Source:: Digiday