“If people become a subscriber to The Telegraph after clicking on a link in a newsletter, they’re 50% more likely to still be a subscriber a year later,” Head of Newsletters Maire Boneheim says, illustrating the power of the format for subscriber engagement and retention.
In the past few years, The Telegraph has been expanding its newsletter team and taking the format much more seriously. Bonheim, who joined the publisher in 2022, came on the Media Voices podcast along with Deputy Head of Newsletters David Alexander to talk about the untapped potential of newsletters, and what they’ve learned from their time working on The Telegraph’s newsletter portfolio.
Different newsletters for different purposes
Although The Telegraph has 35 newsletters in total, these serve different purposes for the subscriptions-focused publisher. “Some of [the newsletters] might be specifically aimed at providing a short window to registrants who aren’t sure yet and are dipping their toes,” Bonheim outlined. “They do different things and we assess them using different metrics.”
The newsletter team constantly assess and review performance of the newsletters, not just in terms of growth, but engagement metrics like open and click rates, as well as what people are reading when they click through. That can sometimes mean cutting underperforming newsletters. Already this year they have cut two; one because the niche was too small, and one which was merged into another newsletter.
The Telegraph’s articles are all behind a hard registration wall. Some of its newsletters are free as long as users have registered for an account, and many offer exclusive content not available elsewhere.
“Our Dispatches newsletter is sent twice a week, and it includes correspondence from reporters that are on the ground in places like Ukraine and Gaza, providing genuinely incredible content that’s exclusive to the newsletter that you can’t find anywhere else,” explained Bonheim. “That shows a reader who might not be sure about subscribing to The Telegraph yet the level of content that we produce.”
Using subscriber-only newsletters for conversion
Newsletters play an important part in The Telegraph’s subscriber retention strategy. Some newsletters are only available to paying subscribers, like The Matt Newsletter from Telegraph cartoonist Matt Pritchett, or Your Royal Appointment Newsletter all about the Royal family.
But the publisher has been strategic about opening up these newsletters on occasion to drive conversions. “During the coronation last year, we did a free trial for registrants – you didn’t need to be a [paid Telegraph] subscriber to read it,” said Bonheim of their Royal-focused newsletter. “We did a special edition daily send over that time. Journalists from around the newsroom contributed amazing segments for that, for example food, the ancient traditions of the coronation, various bits and pieces of royal content that you couldn’t find anywhere else.”
Registered Telegraph readers were invited to sign up and receive a free trial of the subscriber-only newsletter in the lead-up to the coronation. “At the end of it, we did convert quite a substantial number of those to becoming follow-on subscribers as a result,” Bonheim explained. Opening up exclusive newsletters like this is a smart way of giving interested readers a taste of what they’re otherwise missing by not being a subscriber, as well as tying it to a specific, time-limited event.
Listen to the full episode with Maire Bonheim and David Alexander here, or by searching Media Voices on your podcast app of choice:
Building community through personality-led newsletters
Other newsletters in the portfolio are growing to play a valuable role in community-building for the publisher. One example is The Telegraph Politics Newsletter, penned by Political Reporter Dominic Penna. The daily newsletter is free to registrants, and Penna regularly solicits reader questions for his interviews with politicians.
“The response is absolutely massive,” Bonheim said, when Penna asks for reader questions. “If he asks a question in that newsletter, he’ll receive hundreds, or even thousands of responses. So we can see that the engagement is there, and people are truly building a relationship with him as a journalist.”
The questions from readers often go on to generate newslines and become stories, both online and in print. Deputy Head of Newsletters David Alexander speculated that the fact the newsletter is personality-led, and comes from Penna himself, really helps build the connection.
“[Penna’s] personality facilitates this great community, which ends up with user-generated journalism,” Alexander explained. “He’s the connective tissue; I don’t think there would be the same response if it was just an anonymous call-out for questions from readers.
“It’s an opportunity to show off to the world how good our political journalism is. And at the same time, because it’s a newsletter, it can be that extra little bit more playful, and whimsical, and fun, while also being serious when it needs to be… It gives journalists an opportunity to show a bit more of themselves than they normally would do in the course of normal work.”
Such has been the success of the community-building efforts on the newsletter that they have just hosted their first live event, not from The Telegraph, but presented by The Telegraph Politics Newsletter. The Lunch Hour event opened bookings for the fifty in-person attendees and the livestream exclusively to newsletter subscribers, giving them the opportunity to submit questions for guest Nigel Farage; just like the newsletter interviews.
“The success of these reader-led interviews, which are hosted exclusively in the newsletter, deserves a live event of this scale because the engagement has been so high,” commented Alexander. “I think it’s testament to how successful that newsletter has been, and what a great community has built up around it.”
Newsletters work well for community-building because the barrier to entry for readers is quite low. “To be part of the community, there’s not a huge amount they have to do,” Alexander explained. “When they put their email in, we come to them directly into their inbox, they don’t have to go looking for us.
“In return, for them to participate in the community, all they have to do is reply to the email. The onus is then on us to do something interesting with the comments, and show that it’s a circular relationship.”
The power of newsletters for conversion and retention
Having a range of newsletters for people at different parts of the subscriber funnel is a strategy which is paying off for The Telegraph. Getting that email address initially is the beginning of a relationship which is proving stronger than those converted through other means.
“If people become a subscriber to The Telegraph after clicking on a link in a newsletter, they’re 50% more likely to still be a subscriber a year later,” Bonheim noted. “We definitely do see that being engaged with newsletters, and subscribing on the basis of a newsletter, really creates a high-quality reader who is likely to remain engaged with The Telegraph long-term.”
One point which stood out from Bonheim and Alexander’s interview is the use of exclusive content in newsletters. The publisher has a small selection of automated newsletters which send out lists of articles curated based on reader interests, but Bonheim was reluctant to call them newsletters “in the traditional sense, because they don’t include exclusive written content in them.”
These perform well in terms of reader interaction, and provide a service for some registrants and subscribers who simply want a no-nonsense list of top articles that are relevant to them. Yet it is the editorials, segments, analysis and call-outs written specifically for newsletter readers which help build a longer-term relationship.
Maire and David will be appearing at this year’s Publisher Newsletter Summit; a day-long conference in London on June 12th dedicated to all things newsletters. More info and tickets here.
