Lessons from The Telegraph’s newsletters

Panel:

• David Alexander, deputy head of newsletters, The Telegraph
• Maire Bonheim, head of newsletters at The Telegraph.
• Chair: Laura Kelly, freelance writer, editor, and multimedia journalist.

David used to work at Metro as a newsletter editor, where he helped launch four newsletters and relaunch one. Maire currently oversees the 56 Telegraph newsletters, but before she took them on she’s worked on both the commercial and editorial sides of the business.

Over the last year, they’ve launched a women’s sport email, as well as some newsletter series. They’re doing engagement work, through letting readers submit questions for politicians that they then put to them, and publish the answers in the newsletter. They’re doing live events. And a rebranding of their money newsletter increased the number of clicks by 120%. And they increased conversion to paid subscription by 45%.

Diagnosing a failing newsletter

“It’s not that hard,” says David. “As long as you’re very clear as to what you want it to do, the stats are always to hand.”

If the open rate is very, very low, it’s not working. Open rates are quite unreliable, though, he says. “What counts as good varies from places to places. If you have a small bunch of readers, you’re likely to have a higher open rate than if you have a huge number.”

Make sure you know what the key metric is for the purpose of the newsletter. But don’t try to make all the stats great, he suggests.

What assumptions did you build the newsletter around?

Maire points out that one diagnosis of the problem with a particular newsletter can come from looking back at your initial assumptions, and challenging them. Come up with a theory as to why you went wrong — and then test it.

You can use calls to action in the newsletter to get feedback, whether through a feedback rating click or soliciting direct feedback by asking the readers to hit “reply”

Maire went through a process of deep analysis of the money newsletter when they set out to revamp it, and built incremental changes based on that analysis. They did subject line analysis, finding that “You” “Your” and personal subject lines worked well. They shortened the content, and made it more personal and relevant to the readers. Likewise, they changed the format, including more overt calls to action, used more pictures and buttons, and reordered the content. They used web performance figures to inform what they put in the newsletter, in terms of both the written and linked content they include. This process took months.

Common mistakes newsletter publishers make

People take their audience for granted, they suggest. They see high initial open rates, and they slack off. They cut the newsletter to the bones, or just fill it with links when the subscribers actually want something to read. “Don’t be arrogant about it,” says David.

“However, don’t just take what they say in a survey as gospel,” says Maire. “We have launched things based on reader feedback, and had to pivot to something they actually want.”

Maire hasn’t found that changing names of senders has had a negative impact — but that list cleanses are essential. Make sure that everyone who is subscribed really wants to be. A daily send newsletter has more regular culls of inactive newsletter subscribers than the weeklies. A cleanse of the subscriber list of a seasonal newsletter like the Ski newsletter only happens annually, at the end of the season. They’ve made their list cleanses more strict, because of the sheer volume they were sending. They were finding editorial newsletters going into the Gmail promotional tab, for example. That needed to be fixed.

Beware of subject lines that can be spammy, or artificially inflating lists through every technique you can because that can look spammy to the algorithms too.

Growth fixes

“First of all, really focus on the reader needs, the content, and who they actually are. Then meeting the readers where they are. For example, social media is big for our women’s sport newsletter. Doing the right website placements for the right audience can be great, too,” says Maire.

The habit-building and personal connection are the crux of everything. For example, the politics newsletter had a big name writer who then left the Telegraph. But they’ve kept and grown the audience by replacing him with another passionate journalist, who puts his name and face to the newsletter.

The EVs newsletter got merged into the cars newsletter, because of the direction of travel of the industry. And that meant they weren’t splitting the audience – and weren’t splitting the desk’s attention.

They killed their Formula One newsletter — it did have a small, but highly engaged, audience. But ultimately, it wasn’t growing enough, and so it wasn’t worth committing the time to.