Hi, I'm Lennart Schneider, Founder of Subscribe Now, helping decision-makers in the subscription economy attract subscribers and keep them happy.

When I talk to newsletter creators, it usually doesn't take long before one of two questions comes up:

1) What actually constitutes a good open rate?

2) My newsletter has an open rate of 40%. That's great, isn't it?

The honest answer is: There is no such thing as a "good" open rate, and the open rate really says nothing about the quality of your newsletter. 

In this article, I want to clear up this misconception and explain when you should still pay attention to it.

P.S. I've written a book! The playbook for successful subscription models: With growth strategies and best practices from 50 leading companies. You can pre-order here (or on Amazon).

Why open rate says nothing about the quality of your newsletter

The post Why I don’t care about your newsletter open rates appeared first on Audiencers.

We sat down with Joshi Herrmann, founder of The Mill, a UK-based digital publisher known for its award-winning, high-quality local news newsletters. He discussed what an “overwhelmingly reader-driven” revenue strategy means for their business:
-> Cities are chosen based on having the right person to pioneer the launch. Herrmann looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism
-> Funds, when needed, have been from individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines
-> The company has a model that prioritizes readers over traffic and quality over volume

> The Mill launched in Manchester in 2020 on the bet that people would pay for proper local journalism if you actually gave them proper local journalism. Six cities later it has around 13,000 paying subscribers and 175,000 on free lists

> Founder Joshi Herrmann priced it at roughly double what most Substack newsletters charged. Quality over volume only works if the price says so too

> Advertising is about 5% of revenue, by choice. As Herrmann puts it, "if you're reader-funded, your incentive is to give quality to those readers"

> Cities aren't chosen by market size or demographics. The determining factor is finding one person who loves the place and believes in narrative journalism, which outweighs picking a bigger city

> Each city is expected to break even within two to three years, and Manchester and Sheffield already have. The funding came from individuals who care about journalism rather than funds with exit timelines

“Proper local journalism”

Joshi Herrmann launched The Mill in 2020 with a simple bet: people would pay for proper local journalism if you actually gave them proper local journalism. Four years later, he’s got around 13,000 paying subscribers across six cities and is proving that the UK’s regional newspaper groups have been getting it wrong for two decades.

The Manchester Evening News was publishing stories about Piers Morgan. The Liverpool Echo was chasing whatever TV drama was trending that week. Across Britain’s major cities, regional newspapers that once employed hundreds of journalists and broke real stories had become traffic farms covered in programmatic ads, churning out whatever might get clicks.

“The executives in charge of these amazing media companies were trashing these brands so comprehensively and letting down local readers in the process,” Herrmann says. “That annoyed me, but it also felt like an opportunity to prove that they were doing it wrong.”

Trading ads for readers

“In local news in the UK, there had been a focus on advertising revenue rather than subscription revenue for a long time.” “The switch to digital had fundamentally been a switch from making most of your money in print from advertising to making most of your money from advertising in a digital setting. And I was aware that wasn’t working as a model.”

Go to any regional newspaper website, and you’d see the result. Dozens of stories that had nothing to do with the city. Websites plastered with terrible ads. Content designed purely to drive traffic volume rather than serve readers.

“If I thought that was an insane situation for a high-quality local newspaper,” Herrmann says, “then I knew that lots of other people would agree with me.”

Lockdown launch

The timing was accidental. Herrmann had been in the Czech Republic, planning to write a book about his family and the Holocaust. The pandemic killed that plan and he ended up back in the UK helping his sister and spending time in the garden and wondering what to do next.

The post The Mill Media’s Simple Bet: Readers Pay for Quality appeared first on Audiencers.

Newsletters are a powerful engaging, habit-forming and loyalty-building tool for publishers employing a reader revenue model. And there are a huge variety of ways that you can convince a reader to convert.

To inspire your efforts, we’ve created this collection of benchmarks, categorized by format-type.

Landing page

Banner

Side module

Within the article

At the bottom of the article

Pop-up

Newsletter wall

Newsletter quiz

Special section for The Washington Post who built a newsletter quiz for readers to discover the newsletter best suited to their interests.

The post Benchmark ideas to increase newsletter subscribers appeared first on Audiencers.

Anil Chitrapu is a Senior Product Manager at Wirecutter (The New York Times), focused on audience growth, AI, and personalization.

In this article, Anil takes a closer look into the operational choices, guardrails, and tech powering Wirecutter For You, the new email that tailors article recommendations to each reader – without compromising editorial judgment or inbox trust.

> Wirecutter shipped Wirecutter For You, a personalized weekly email, in under a month. It worked because the scope was deliberately narrow: editorial content only, no product recommendations, built on existing New York Times infrastructure

> The algorithm only picks from an editor-approved pool, kept small enough that editors recognise every recommendation. Sensitive categories and stale pieces are excluded before the model sees anything

> The sharpest decision was a no-send path built in from day one. If the system can't confidently assemble a strong lineup for a reader, it skips that week rather than sending something subpar

> They optimised for session quality rather than click-through rate and ran a holdout group from the start. So far there is no sign the personalized email is cannibalising their existing editorial newsletters

> Anil Chitrapu's conclusion: "personalization doesn't have to mean prediction. It can mean respect: understanding what readers already trust you for, and delivering more of it, deliberately"

Wirecutter, The New York Times’ product recommendation service, shares the same commitment to rigorous journalism that defines our broader newsroom. The mission has always been to help readers make confident, informed decisions about the products in their lives – from the best gifts to the most reliable home appliances – through reporting that is diligent, transparent, and practical.

But reaching readers today requires more than great reporting; it demands a thoughtful approach to how we surface that journalism. As information overload grows and attention spans shorten, the challenge expands beyond what we publish to how we make sure each reader finds what’s most relevant to them. Within Wirecutter, we’ve long debated how to use technology to serve that mission responsibly. Our goal has never been to replace the editorial voice that makes our product recommendations distinct, but to use personalization as a way to extend it: to help every reader find the next right thing at the right time, in a way that still feels unmistakably like us. Every design decision flowed from that principle: personalization should extend editorial judgment, not replace it.

This idea led to the creation of Wirecutter For You, a weekly email that pairs our journalism with a robust personalization model to deliver tailored article recommendations. The system we created is designed for flexibility and oversight, allowing us to refine its rules and outputs in tandem. In the sections that follow, we’ll share why we built it, how it works, and what this taught us about bridging editorial craft and algorithmic systems.

Why we built it

As we entered Q4 (our yearly peak shopping period), Wirecutter wanted to build a resilient and automated channel to help our readers find their way to more of our journalism. Even with our deep library, many readers only ever see a fraction of Wirecutter’s journalism. Personalization gave us a way to surface the right story at the right moment. Our goal was to develop a product that would be able to learn from a reader’s browsing history while maintaining Wirecutter’s standards.

At a high level, we wanted to answer a simple question: how could we introduce personalization to Wirecutter in a way that still felt entirely editorial and intentional? For us, that meant starting in a space where we could test carefully, learn quickly, and retain full control over tone and trust – and email was the perfect place to do that. It gave us a contained environment to experiment with personalization primitives, measure impact, and ensure deliverability, all without changing the on-site experience until we got signal.

We designed the program’s format with three primary goals.

• First, we wanted to build a weekly reading habit that complemented our existing editorial newsletters – adding value without displacing what readers already trusted.
• Second, we used the email as a controlled space to learn: testing personalization logic, tracking engagement and trust metrics, and validating that the signals we captured could scale across unique email sends.
• Finally, we treated this as an early framework for how personalization should operate across Wirecutter: establishing the rules, measurement standards, and editorial guardrails that future products could build on.

Because this was new territory, we defined success less by traffic spikes and more by durable reader signals: quality over clicks, inbox trust and deliverability, and long-term engagement that deepened – not diluted – our relationship with subscribers.

What we launched

After a small hardcoded pilot earlier in the year gave us confidence in the format, we began developing a dynamic weekly email that could scale – one capable of dynamically tailoring article recommendations for readers while staying true to our editorial standards. The goal was simple but ambitious: to create a product that felt more personal than automated, guided by the same standards our newsroom applies to any published work.

We launched Wirecutter For You as a weekly Sunday send, designed to deliver personalized story recommendations alongside a concise, editor-written lede. Each version draws from a reader’s recent engagement and a curated, editor-approved content pool. We started with a small, highly engaged audience to monitor performance and maintain deliverability as we introduced a new sender identity.

The post How NYT Wirecutter shipped a personalized newsletter in 4 weeks appeared first on Audiencers.

In a strategic move to engage a new and distinct audience, as well as take note from the creator economy, The Economist has launched its data journalism newsletter, “Off the Charts,” on Substack. This decision to venture beyond its traditional paywalled ecosystem offers a fascinating glimpse into how a legacy publisher is adapting to the evolving digital landscape.

I sat down with Aaron Coultate, Head of Newsletters at The Economist, to discuss the thinking behind this exciting initiative.

> The Economist has put Off the Charts, its data journalism newsletter, on Substack, deliberately building an audience on a platform it doesn't own to reach people not yet ready for a full subscription

> The reasoning is where readers already are. Substack has over 5 million users, many of them data visualisation enthusiasts, plus discovery, recommendation and community features a plain email newsletter can't match

> The Economist publishes unsigned, so the creator economy is an awkward fit. Its answer is a collective personality: a rotating cast of data journalists, so readers get to know a team rather than a star

> Cannibalisation is managed by keeping nothing exclusive. The £7 monthly Substack tier carries the same data journalism core subscribers already receive, adding only the archive and a comments section

> Aaron Coultate is explicit that this is meant to be a standalone product rather than a funnel into the main subscription. Success is measured in Substack growth and engagement, not conversions

Context: an innovative idea for an established product

The idea to launch “Off the Charts” on Substack was born from a great collaboration between the editorial and commercial teams. The core idea? To find a new way to reach potential readers who are interested in a specific area of The Economist’s content but might not be ready to commit to a full subscription just yet.

“Off the Charts” was the perfect candidate for this experiment. It originally launched as a free newsletter back in 2021 before being moved behind the paywall as part of the core subscription. But the vibrant data journalism community that had grown around it was too compelling to ignore. This new Substack launch, which was in the works for several months, is a deliberate effort to both create a new revenue stream and nurture that niche audience.

The post The Economist’s Substack experiment: building a newsletter product off-platform appeared first on Audiencers.

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

The post Newsletters in the fight for sustainability, with Toronto Star, BBC & Reuters appeared first on Audiencers.

Reuters’ Elaine Piniat and Judith Langowski share how they’re using A/B testing to optimize newsletter performance without getting lost in complex tweaks.

> Reuters found that stripping things out beats adding them. Removing images from list-style newsletters lifted click-through by 29 to 33%, and removing item descriptions lifted it by an average of 59%

> That descriptions test came from a Washington Post colleague at a conference and was confirmed by former Newsday staff. Reuters ran it across three newsletters rather than assuming it would transfer

> Moving the newsletter sign-up module to the top of articles cost some ad revenue. Testing showed it performed 50% better, so the trade was justified. Module clicks then rose 63%

> Position kept mattering more than content. Click-focused sections placed higher in narrative newsletters always won, and an image moved from top to bottom lifted click-through by 15%

> For the Daily Briefing relaunch the team built three prototypes and surveyed 300 readers. The shortest, most concise version won over versions offering background or a deep dive

A cornerstone of audience strategy is a/b testing. The media industry, which is frequently inundated by new and shiny tools and ways of telling stories, must constantly iterate to keep our audiences engaged and informed. It’s easy to get lost in the competition and tweaks to algorithms, leading to overthinking and overdeveloping. But a/b testing doesn’t have to be so complicated. If we keep the reader at the center and go back to the basics, we can see meaningful impact.

The post 5 essentials when A/B testing from Reuters’ newsletter team appeared first on Audiencers.

David Topping is the director of newsletters at the Toronto Star and its parent company Torstar.

> 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

The post How the Toronto Star gets new subscribers onto newsletters to engage and retain appeared first on Audiencers.

At The Audiencers’ Newsletter Workshop in New York in March 2024, Kelly Poe of The Washington Post shared how they’ve worked to increase click through rates across their newsletter portfolio.

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