In this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, Metro.co.uk’s Newsletter Editor Sophie Laughton takes us through… everything newsletter.
From how the Metro’s redesign allowed the newsletter team to break silos, through how they’re solving discovery issues, to what newsletters offer that no other medium can, Laughton provides an A-Z on newsletters for publishers.
This is both a newsletter strategy 101 and a rallying cry for what newsletters can offer to publishers.
Have you got a brilliant newsletter, or portfolio of them? Entries are now open for the Publisher Newsletter Awards!
Here are some highlights from the episode, lightly edited for clarity:
Breaking the silos within the newsroom
Bringing all of those learnings into one place and trialling different things has been very valuable. There are so many aspects of being in a newsroom where things are very siloed.
This is a very good opportunity to for someone to be able to step back and go, ‘Okay, this is how we make something work with commercial and your desk, and then we can do this fun thing with some tech, and then we’ve made it all look beautiful’.
Solving the discovery problem
That’s something that we’ve definitely done a lot of work on, and that was one of the real reasons why we wanted to do the site redesign as a whole. But [we wanted] specifically the newsletter pages redesign, making it easier to have these call to actions popping up all over the site saying, ‘You’re on the politics page on the site, here’s the politics newsletter. You’re on the soaps page, here’s the soaps newsletter’.
So they’re within our articles and woven in there at the bottom. [You get a] link in the middle of the article… so you don’t have to come back to us.
Marketing newsletters internally
This is something that’s actually only come quite recently, [us] trying to give newsletters a face in the newsroom. And what we’ve been trying to do is going to teams and involving them in the process and saying, ‘Well, you actually have a travel newsletter so let’s get you involved in the production of this newsletter’.
We go to audience meetings, and we give each of the desks a report on how newsletters that fall under their section have performed, and give them the insights that we’ve learned from them, and say, ‘This particular audience really liked this story, or there’s a lot of interest around this, or they particularly asked for this’.
That’s something that different desks have responded to really well and have found really interesting, because it wasn’t necessarily something that they really knew about before or thought about before, and I think that’s been really good for Metro as a whole. [We’re] actually thinking this is a new opportunity, and this is a new place that we can grow, build engagement, and build loyalty.
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