© Illustration by Aurélie Garnier
David Topping is the director of newsletters at the Toronto Star and its parent company Torstar.
Key takeaways to copy & share
> The Toronto Star found in 2021 that digital subscribers receiving at least one newsletter were half as likely to cancel. Its flagship morning newsletter now comes with every new subscription > Canadian anti-spam law rules out quietly adding people, so the Star went the other way: loud about the inclusion before, during and after signup, and aggressive about offering the exit > First Up now reaches 286,000 inboxes, 67,000 of them paying subscribers, with 25,000 added by this route. Newsletter reach among subscribers went from one in five to more than half > Nobody was held back as a control group, so the churn effect remains unproven. Their own verdict is that they are confident it helps but have not yet shown it > It ran for years on a manual query, holding lists and a Google Doc of exclusions before being rebuilt as a webhook. Only then could it extend to sister titles and registered users
