I was at the incredibly successful (and jam-packed) Audiencers’ Festival on the 24th of June 2025, and attended some truly insightful sessions by some of the most inspiring audience developers and marketing managers from the most innovative media houses in the world.
The buzzword of the day was ‘belonging’, the new KPI for newsrooms, and a sure-shot way to build sustainability – attracting and retaining audiences, ensuring brand loyalty. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Heiko Scherer’s article detailing the idea of belonging and how newsrooms have successfully converted User Needs into powerful audience development drivers.
One of the ways to do so is, of course, via email newsletters.
The humble newsletter has come a long way, and just when you think we can’t possibly improve it any more, enter Zoé Tabary of the BBC, Elaine Piniat from Reuters, and David Topping, formerly with the Toronto Star.
Their work on experimenting with and refining newsletters to reach, convert, and engage audiences provides critical insight into how you can extract the maximum value from your audience’s inbox.
> Reuters replaced its data wall with a paywall and lost its best newsletter acquisition channel in the process. Rebuilding meant sorting every newsletter by which KPI it actually serves > Their three buckets: automated newsletters for advertisers and traffic, briefings for conversion, and industry titles for subscriber retention. Each is measured differently rather than all chasing opens > Disengagement gets its own sequence. You haven't opened this in a while, then maybe your interests have changed and here are others, then you've been unsubscribed. They also survey the disengaged about why > The BBC built Upbeat for news avoiders, now nearly 39% of people against 29% eight years ago. Seven hundred words of positive stories, deliberately withholding enough to send readers on to the site > David Topping's rules from the Toronto Star: pick one word your newsletter promises, tell readers why to click rather than just linking the headline, and make the call to action a big stupid button
