Newsletter strategies: Insights from The Scotsman, Metro and The i Paper London Journal

National World has revealed how it has found a market for paid email newsletters and Metro has shared insights into revamping its newsletter sign-up process.

Meanwhile, The i Paper has transformed its newsletter strategy with significant investment and “energy from every department”. All three publishers were speaking at the Publisher Newsletter Summit in London on Tuesday.

Launching a limited newsletter in just 12 instalments priced at £9.99 was a “big swing” for The Scotsman that is showing early signals of success.

National World, which has around 120 newsletters in total, launched its first paid limited series this year.

The Scotsman launched a limited newsletter series called Scottish Golf Courses You Must Play in January with commentary from golf writer Martin Dempster and useful information about ten courses across 12 instalments, costing £9.99.

The newsletters are sent automatically over the course of two weeks after someone signs up.

Head of newsletters Neil Macdonald explained that the business had never done anything like this before and was keen to innovate and try something new but “not at any cost” – they had to “choose carefully” what the right topic and brand would be, he said.

Macdonald said: “It had to fit one of our brands, there had to be an audience for it, we had to have the resources and the skills to produce it.

“We also wanted it to be evergreen. We didn’t want it to be something that we’d have to constantly go back to and something that would demand that ongoing level of resource.”

He said The Scotsman and golf were therefore a “great place to start” as National World’s biggest brand with a “clear connection” to the sport with an established audience both in Scotland and internationally.““

Other considerations, Macdonald said, were that quality was key because they were asking people to pay and it was a “relatively short series of sends – it’s not something like a normal newsletter where we can develop it and test things and change things as we go on week to week. We knew it had to hit the ground running straight out the gate”.

One example of ensuring the quality was not relying on The Scotsman’s archive but going out and taking new photos of all the golf courses, helping to “lift it to another level”.

“The other thing in terms of the quality was obviously it stands or falls by the quality of the writing,” Macdonald continued. He said one of his major lessons was to trust Dempster – and various teams around National World who were involved – to do what they did best.

“Probably the trickiest single thing” was setting the price point, Macdonald said of the pop-up newsletter citing the dilemma between making it too expensive versus too low and implying that it wasn’t worth buying.

Factors taken into account included other Scotsman subscriptions (a website subscription costs from £6.99 to £12.99 per month after trials), golf books, and the demographic of the potential audience – people with the money to play golf and travel to do so.

Macdonald shared that so far the series is “well into the multiple hundreds of pounds of revenue”. There are usually regular sales throughout the week and spikes around certain events like golf tournaments and The Scotsman’s recent Business of Golf series of coverage.

There was a lot of promotion around the newsletter but Macdonald said the key thing is “how to keep it going – I think in our industry something that’s brand new and shiny today can be forgotten about tomorrow such is the pace of change, such is the pace of new projects that come along that everyone has to suddenly switch their attention to, such as we were taken over recently”.

They therefore set up a newsroom champion to keep shouting about it and making sure it gets promoted in relevant stories, will continue promoting it around relevant events such as the upcoming Scottish Open, and Macdonald revealed they are in the process of making it available to all premium subscribers on The Scotsman to hopefully “make the value of the subscription all the greater”.

By their nature, email newsletters can be forwarded on for free. Macdonald said: “I guess with any paid-for newsletter you can’t stop people sharing them, but we just hoped that people would play fair and in a way I didn’t mind too much if people shared the odd one. I didn’t think it was going to be that much of an impact.”

Macdonald said the project has provided a “model that we can use for similar products in the future” with further series in the works in the areas of nostalgia, sport and personal finance.

Metro has had a “really promising” six months for sign-ups to its 15 newsletters following a major revamp of its acquisition points, according to newsletter editor Sophie Laughton.

Metro relaunched its website with a new-look, mobile-first layout in November 2024 and the newsletters also benefited.

Laughton said the previous newsletter sign-up points were “not a great user experience, it wasn’t particularly clear on our newsletters page how people had to sign up, it was a bit convoluted with where they entered their email address.

“And the other thing is it was actually really clunky and time-consuming to set up these pages or make any changes to them. When we wanted to launch a new newsletter, just launching on the front end could take up to six months of dev work and going through UX design. So it was challenging to make sure that we could actually launch new newsletters and make sure that people could see our newsletters.

“They also weren’t particularly cohesive – there was inconsistency with different newsletters across the brand.”

The redesign strategy prioritised three things: that newsletters would be easy to launch with sign-up points straightforward to roll out, that they would be easy for users to sign up, and that they would be easy to produce. The redesign “put the control” in the hands of the editorial newsletter team, Laughton said, meaning they could now build everything in the backend as easily as if it was a standard article.

Metro now has a “much sleeker” newsletter page with an average conversion rate of 10% and new easily customisable landing pages for every newsletter (previously only some had one) with average conversion rates of between 10 to 22%.

There are also flexible call-to-action sign-up points that can be put on any page on the website, for example on relevant section pages, at the end of every article and widgets in the sidebar. These drove about 14% of total sign-ups last month.

The team noticed that people don’t always get to the end of the article to see those prompts, so they created factbox-style call-to-actions to go higher up within stories. For example promo for the gaming newsletter in stories about the release of the Nintendo Switch 2 and a call for “personalised updates on all things Netflix” pointing to the TV newsletter.

Almost 50% of new sign-ups last week came from these article boxes.

Laughton also cited pop-ups that appear when people are scrolling through the site based on their dwell time. These overlays drove nearly 1,000 sign-ups in May.

Laughton said the initial results from the redesign had been “really promising” with 1.6% month-on-month growth in sign-ups compared to 0.7% in October.

However in December traffic to the whole site “dropped dramatically”, affecting sign-ups, meaning they began to look more off-site.

They began using Metro’s print edition to promote the horoscopes newsletter – an area of “high interest” among the paper readers – with a full-page advert and QR code to sign up. Laughton said this has driven between 200 and 500 sign-ups with each placement.

They also looked at their Facebook strategy and had “really mixed results”. Some 23% of subscriptions to sex and relationships newsletter The Hook Up come from Facebook each month with an average monthly growth rate of 4.5%, which Laughton described as a “really strong growth rate for a mid-sized list”.

But a politics post featuring a tease towards exclusive content written by politics reporter Craig Munro about Pope Francis in the Alright Guv newsletter led to zero sign-ups despite the Facebook post having around 1,000 reactions and almost 200 comments. Laughton said they planned to pivot away from Facebook for Alright Guv towards Whatsapp Channels where the soaps and gaming topics are already seeing success.

Laughton said that ideally Metro wants people signed up to as many newsletters as possible so wants to make them aware of others during their welcome journey and then show them on-site overlays when someone is signed up to one but keep browsing articles more related to another newsletter, for example.

There is “energy from every department” around newsletters following investment at The i Paper.

Georgia Chambers, who has worked at The i Paper as newsletter editor for five years, described how for the first four years it was just her overseeing around 18 newsletters but investment in the past year has made a difference.

The i Paper currently has 12 free newsletters, seven subscriber-only newsletters and six “news alerts” (emails that share the latest stories on certain topics when they get published).

The most popular newsletters at The i Paper, Chambers said, are those rounding up the headlines each morning and evening – they are free with a list of links. She said they are “really important to us because… it allows our content to get in front of as many people as possible.

“And by having these sort of traffic-driving newsletters, it’s a great complement to our more editorial newsletters, such as subscriber-only ones, things that are a lot more written through. So it’s interesting to see how automated newsletters are really popular.”

The flagship free newsletter is The Essential, written by Chambers, which is more editorialised and tells people what they need to know and why it matters.

And the one that has been “growing the most consistently” is the free money newsletter, which Chambers said has increased to three times a week as a result. “We had so much money content at the time and we really felt like it was of value to people.”

Chambers urged publishers that they “need to invest in newsletters. I’ll be frank: for the first four years I was at The i Paper it was me versus probably almost 18 newsletters, I think we had on the books. I managed it the best I could, burnout definitely became a familiar friend of mine, but it became difficult to think about the bigger picture and to be constantly evolving the strategy that I’d created.

“So now I’m pleased to say that The i Paper has invested a lot more in newsletters and it’s really great to see the energy behind newsletters in the newsroom from every department as well because it really does need to be a collaborative project.”

Part of the investment included hiring a head of newsletters, Kieran Davey, previously an audience editor at Reach.

“He has been integral, actually, in beginning to think about the bigger picture for our newsletters and thinking about a robust strategy which we are constantly adapting and evolving.”

Chambers advised experimenting and not being afraid to fail because at least it provides valuable data insights to learn from.

And she suggested thinking about newsletters with the question: “Is it something I’d pay money for if it didn’t have a website attached to it?” when building a portfolio that a publisher would want to make money from. Although the emails with lists of links are popular, she said people would not give money for them.

Asked about whether the demand for newsletters might be levelling off, Chambers said: “That is the issue, of course, with newsletters: while they are obviously a great way of getting content in front of readers we have experienced fatigue and it hasn’t always been consistent at The i Paper, we have experienced drops in growth, particularly around certain newsletters which are perhaps more of a niche interest or perhaps you wouldn’t expect to grow so quickly.

“The way we’ve sort of managed this is we’re constantly monitoring the data to inform how our newsletters are doing and importantly as well our marketing team, we send out emails to make people just aware of what’s going on. So we might reawaken people that haven’t opened a newsletter in a while and just be like ‘have you explored all of the benefits of this newsletter, have you considered taking out a subscription?’ I think it’s just that brand awareness…

“I think importantly you can’t just treat your readers as just a passive thing you send emails to. I think it does need to be a reciprocal relationship,” Chambers said, citing The i Paper doing regular reader surveys.

The post Newsletter strategies: Insights from The Scotsman, Metro and The i Paper appeared first on Press Gazette.

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