We missed this announcement late in January – although we are somewhat late with the news we thought it worth mentioning if it bypassed you too?
A key priority of The Daily Telegraph’s digital strategy is to grow the number of registered users accessing the site, and one of the pillars supporting this initiative is a new and improved approach to email newsletters.
The publisher launched six editorial newsletters over a period of six weeks, in a drive to refresh its newsletter strategy, previously a medium primarily used by commercial teams, explained Dan Silver, head of digital publishing at The Telegraph.
“We talk very much here about drawing the distinction between promotional newsletters and editorial newsletters, promotional ones being much more based around ROI and generating leads,” Silver told Journalism.co.uk in a recent podcast.
“Editorial newsletters we consider to be stand alone pieces of editorial content, either written or curated for an audience, full of authored analysis.”
The strategy doesn’t rely on readers clicking on links to get back to the Telegraph website, with the team having a relaxed approach about whether a reader clicks back through to the website or ends their involvement with the newsletter once they have finished reading.
The six newsletters were born with this approach in mind: Front Bench, the morning political email; Brexit Bulletin, an afternoon political newsletter focused on Brexit; three rugby newsletters called Rugby Reader, Rugby Nerd and Geech on Friday; and a revamped technology newsletter, Technology Intelligence.
“One of the key benefits for us as publishers is that newsletters allow us to speak directly to our most engaged audience, which is really important in this age of variable algorithms and search engines and social platforms. Having that direct relationship with readers is really important.”
The newsletters are built around personalities and many heavily feature “authored analysis”. Front Bench is authored by Daniel Capurro, who works on The Telegraph comment desk, and The Brexit Bulletin is authored by a roster of Telegraph political journalists, including Asa Bennet.
