David Topping is the director of newsletters at the Toronto Star and its parent company Torstar.
It’s not news that pushing newsletters to subscribers is essential to holding onto them: I still have screenshots saved from the presentation the data team here at the Toronto Star gave in 2021 proving that digital subscribers back then were half as likely to cancel if they received at least one of our email offerings.
At the time, we had a few ways to get subscribers signed up for our newsletters, like a screen where they could select from a few of our best as they finished creating their accounts, along with promotional email messages we sent them thereafter. What we were missing was a way to get everyone in.
What we’re doing
Canada’s strict anti-spam legislation, CASL, doesn’t let us surprise people by putting them on newsletters they don’t want, something I’ve seen other North American publishers try getting away with.
At the Star, we landed on an approach we thought worked better: We’d include our flagship morning newsletter, First Up, with every new digital subscription. We’d be upfront — loud, even — before, during, and after someone subscribed that doing so came with First Up. And we’d be forthcoming — aggressive, even — when it came to letting recipients leave at every subsequent step we could.
This is how that process goes for every new digital subscriber now, thanks to my then-boss Anna Marie Menezes, colleague Sherina Harris and the Star’s legal, product, and email teams:
How it’s going
On any given month, this method is the second- or third-biggest driver of all newsletter signups at the Star. Five years after we launched First Up, our flagship morning newsletter is now usually read more than anything else we produce online: It lands in 286,000 recipients’ inboxes, 67,000 of whom are paying subscribers, and all told, we’ve added 25,000 paying subscribers to First Up this way. When we first launched our digital subscription program, just one in five subscribers was signed up for any of our newsletters; now, more than half are.
We’re overdue for a closer look at how churn rates have changed for just these subscribers. We’re confident it’s helping, but in hindsight, I wish we’d held a portion of new subscribers back from this flow; that way, we could more easily isolate the impact on everyone else now, and maybe I could be writing here that this single-handedly ended churn as we know it. If it has, we haven’t proven it yet.
What’s next?
This started as one of those simple-for-users, absolute-mess-behind-the-scenes solutions. Picture a manual Snowflake query that fed an email automation, holding lists in our email platform we could vet between someone’s subscription and their first newsletter edition if we saw anything suspicious, and a list of exclusions we kept in a Google Doc to give us a chance in hell at remembering to omit, for instance, subscriptions initiated in our iOS and Android apps before our 8.56.0 builds. (Those subscribers would have never seen the same opt-in language as everyone else.)
Temporary solutions have a habit of becoming not-so-temporary ones, but we’re fixing all that now. We’ve refined that complicated process to a webhook that connects to our email platform and doesn’t need zip ties and duct tape to keep together. That’s made it possible — thanks to work from more of my digital-team colleagues Ashley Hawley, Reza Tayefi, Lucas Timmons, Yevhen Badorov, and Naga Penneru — to extend it to the Toronto Star’s sister newspapers, like The Hamilton Spectator and St. Catharines Standard, which have subscribers and flagship newsletters of their own. It’s also made it easier to extend the process to those who register for all our sites so they can do things like comment on articles. It’s not only new subscribers who we serve with our newsletters, and it’s not only new subscribers who we think will benefit from getting our best in their inboxes as soon as they can.
