Breaking News & Pop-up Newsletters: Do They Drive Churn or Loyalty?

Newsletters are part and parcel of publishers’ routine communications with audiences. But where do pop-up and breaking news newsletters fit into the overall engagement effort?

For many publications, including the FT, newsletters are one of if not the most important source of reader engagement.

Generally speaking, newsletters arrive at the same time in your inbox, providing a reliable source of timely information. They become a habit. News, however, isn’t always conveniently habitual. It breaks at all times, without warning. 

Enter the breaking news newsletter. While in form the same, the breaking news newsletter presents unique challenges, including the possibility that publishers turn readers off if they’re not savvy enough to know what to push and not to push, aka judgement.

Too many unfocused alerts will risk readers churning out of annoyance over a publisher’s inability to properly gauge what’s of real interest on a breaking basis. And metrics from irregularly-scheduled newsletters are more difficult to analyze in comparison to their stablemates, making it hard for publishers to decipher whether what they are doing is working. 

While not insurmountable, the challenges are significant. After a publicized launch in 2023, the Wall Street Journal’s irregular newsletter The Debrief is no longer to be found on its newsletters homepage, and a link to subscribe to it leads to a general subscription page. The Journal didn’t respond to a request for information as to what happened to the newsletter.

So, what do irregularly-scheduled newsletters offer to publishers’ strategies—and to what extent are they a part of the newsletter mix for the foreseeable future?

Newsday, which covers Long Island in New York, sees sending breaking news via existing newsletter lists as benefitting their engagement strategy, Erin Serpico, director of newsletter and email experiences at the paper, said.

“Our breaking news newsletters and email alerts are the most consistent driver of website traffic and subscription starts from all of Newsday’s newsletter offerings,” Serpico said. “We don’t feature the full story or all details of the story in our emails—the user is driven to the site to read more, which opens the door for them to stay with us and engage with other content and serves as a key driver to bring non-paying subscribers to our paywall, increasing our opportunities to sell subscriptions.”

By targeting breaking news alerts to those who have specifically signed up for them, Newsday avoids overwhelming audiences who are also receiving topic-based email newsletters. Building an email list from scratch – as WSJ’s Debrief sought to – can be arduous work as it involves marketing a new product, but it does mean that audiences’ inbox space is respected and rarefied.

While regular newsletters are often discrete and self-contained, the breaking news newsletter is best served to direct audiences to the publishers’ own site for updates and context.

Reach Plc’s engagement director Daniel Russell said that newsletter subscribers can find it jarring to receive breaking news, since they are accustomed to a certain cadence. Reach has found that readers are more likely to see the alerts when they are sent via messaging, like WhatsApp, versus email, which requires going to an inbox and opening the email. 

Another factor in the regular versus irregular comparison is that newsletters created by individuals, which are becoming increasingly common, are often sent whenever they want, and not according to a schedule. Platforms like Substack and Patreon encourage consistency in publishing cadence, but offer the freedom for writers to send as they please, challenging reader expectations.

That approach has been ported across to some publications, too: the Guardian now advertises some of its journalists’ newsletters with the caveat that they’ll come out every now and then, rather than regularly.

The pop-up newsletter

Pop-up newsletters are another kind of irregular publication. They are short runs of themed newsletters that also appear to buck the received wisdom of using newsletters for engagement.

These newsletters are often single-issue narratives or deep dives, doled out over the course of weeks or months. While regularly-scheduled newsletters’ success is measured in terms of audience acquisition over a long period of time, pop-up newsletters’ success is based largely around short-term engagement that attracts new audiences.

“Pop-up newsletters or email series that run as warranted can be an effective way to gather a niche audience and keep them with you,” Serpico said. “We have had some success with rolling out pop-up newsletters that focus on holiday-specific content, and another that curates all updates from a high-profile crime investigation. These types of newsletters have helped us acquire an audience, deliver the right content at the right time, and serve as a gateway to other products we offer.”

In the UK, Total Politics Group regularly launches one-off newsletters aimed at niche audiences. Ludovica D’Angelo, the group’s director of publisher operations, explained that one pop-up newsletter was successful in bringing many new people into the ecosystem: “We created this newsletter—six weeks of it—and had around 2,000 recipients. We had virtually no unsubscribers, basically, and an open rate of over 33%, which is definitely higher than we usually have.”

Other publications are using short-term pop-up newsletters to move audiences over to products, like The Guardian’s five-week long Reclaim Your Brain newsletter series, launched early in 2024. It now has over 146,000 global subscribers, according to Digiday, but the bigger win was using that pop-up experience to entice more than 30,000 people across to its weekly “Well Actually” newsletter after the course ended.

Audiences are now exposed to various kinds of newsletters. Their success comes down to one thing—consideration of what audiences need, and when they need it.