How Immediate Media Uses Newsletters to Enhance Its Subscription and Retention Strategy

By Esther Kezia Thorpe, freelance media analyst and co-founder at Media Voices

UK specialist interest content and platform company Immediate Media, publishers of titles like Radio Times, Gardeners’ World, Good Food, olive, Top Gear and BBC History Magazine, have leaned into the power of newsletters to enhance their subscriber retention and conversion strategy.

At the Publisher Newsletter Summit in London, Immediate’s Head of CRM and Retention Matt Nash shared why newsletters are important to them, where they fit in the customer lifecycle, and the positive results they’ve seen by using the right data.

The publisher primarily uses their portfolio of 39 newsletters for driving readers to the website, promoting subscriptions, and encouraging existing subscribers back into their apps and websites to consume content. Over the past 12 months, they have reached 12 million inboxes.

Newsletter readers are more likely to subscribe

Nash used Good Food to illustrate many of his examples. The food brand – formerly known as BBC Good Food, is the number one food website in the UK, and the first in search for everything from chili con carne to chocolate cookies. As well as the website, Good Food has a monthly print magazine, a premium app, a podcast and the Good Food Show, among other events.

Good Food has a registration wall on its recipes, and it has the biggest registered user base of all Immediate’s titles, as well as being the fastest growing digital subspace with their paid-for app. With such a wide base of users, it is the perfect place to experiment and refine a subscription strategy.

Newsletters have grown to become a key part of Good Food’s subscription strategy because of their ability to convert.

25% of our app subscribers read a newsletter or received a newsletter before going on to subscribe. On average, there’s about 18 months between someone registering on Good Food and then converting to an app subscriber.

We also find that conversion from trial – we run a free trial going into a paid subscription on the app – it’s around 10 percentage points higher for people that have previously been on our newsletter base before converting to a subscription.

“Air traffic control”: Different newsletters for different stages

Immediate’s newsletter lifecycle breaks down into two halves: pre- and post-subscription. “Pre-subscription, we’re focused on pageviews on site, eyes on the product and subscription,” Nash explained. “Post-purchase, we’re looking at using email as a tool within a multi-channel tech stack to get existing users to keep their subscription going.” He describes managing the four or five newsletters for Good Food alongside these journeys as “Air traffic control for newsletters,” emphasizing that processes need streamlining wherever possible to keep this manageable.

Across Immediate’s registration-walled brands, those who fill in their details are automatically opted into the relevant newsletter. Nash is aware of the potential pitfalls of this, and list health is prioritized as part of this journey. “Great power comes with great responsibility, and we try and make sure that a) we’re not bombarding people, and b) if they are not engaging, we’re giving them the opportunity to not receive this again,” he noted. “We don’t want just a really big sized list, we want a good, clean list that is actually well-engaged.”

In the first week or two of someone registering on one of their sites, they are taken on a journey to showcase the various products and content on offer. On Good Food, they bring up the concept of subscription early, as well as the functionality of recipes and the range of cooking tips, reviews, and other articles on the site. Open rates and click-through rates at this stage of the journey are particularly strong, at 30% and 47% higher than the brand’s average email, making this a key phase for showcasing the best of the brand.

Then the customer journey moves onto what Nash described as the “core readership phase,” where disengaged prospects are targeted with re-engagement campaigns or cleaned. “For those that are engaging more regularly, we send an extra newsletter to them a week, which gets essentially the same number of click-throughs as getting in touch with our entire customer base,” said Nash, noting that the timing of these newsletters is vital.

Once a reader has subscribed, a nurture phase begins where Immediate works to prove its value and relevance. This also involves being protected for a time against commercial messaging. Nash explained that there’s a certain amount of ring-fencing at the right times, as well as keeping an eye on the number of communications a subscriber is receiving in any given week. “There’s not any necessary reason why we would do things like an advertising solus campaign or a cross-sell, or anything like that when you’re in your first 30 days,” he said.

The final phase is retention communication, if a customer switches auto-renewal off and is coming to the end of their subscription.

Newsletters for upselling

Immediate has noticed a strong correlation between users logging in and saving recipes, and their propensity to subscribe or remain subscribed. As a result, they’ve tiered their newsletter audience into categories from those who haven’t saved anything, to those who have saved a few, and regular recipe savers. Those in the lower engagement categories are targeted with a specific education campaign to showcase the recipe saving features. “We’ve managed to grow the number of people that have done that by around 7% of the entire subscriber base,” said Nash.

Newsletters give strong signals to publishers about recent engagement. 10% of paying subscribers to Good Food come from targeting and upsell campaigns direct to people’s inboxes after they’ve taken out a subscription.

“Every newsletter that we have is an opportunity for us to try and convert someone if they look like they’re likely to subscribe,” said Nash, explaining that they prioritize signals based around recency of engagement, frequency, and tenure.

Tailored content

The Good Food team has recently been experimenting with tailored newsletters, depending on the actions readers have taken in the app or website. “As part of the onboarding process we have [for Good Food], we’ve included a lot of different categories of recipes,” Nash said. “When they click on their onboarding emails, we fit them into a prospect bucket of growth, budget, or family themed recipes, for example. Then we follow that up later on in the newsletters they receive.”

Tailoring is a tactic that has produced effective results. “We’ve found that there’s around 88% uplift where we’ve done tailored content based on what they’ve engaged with previously compared to just the most recent popular recipes,” shared Nash.

Immediate has also experimented with personalized send times, where their ESP facilitates the emails reaching someone’s inbox at a time when they’re most likely to click on it. Nash noted that they have seen two to five percentage points higher in terms of click-through rates than when they’ve manually chosen a send time.

Paying attention to the data and being unafraid to experiment is vital to optimizing the experience. Nash gave one example where the Good Food team thought that Thursday evenings would be a good time to send a weekly recipe newsletter, to get ahead of people meal-planning for the weekend. But the website data showed that Saturday and Sunday mornings were when people were engaging and doing their meal planning. Using this to adjust the newsletter send day has resulted in a 0.5% higher click-through rate than previously. This may seem small, but over Immediate’s millions of sends, this would result in tens of thousands of additional clicks.

A more optimized future

Immediate is still early on in the journey of effectively using newsletters as part of their subscription strategy. Nash shared that they have ambitious plans for the future, having recently partnered with a Customer Data Platform.

“We want to measure engagement in a more joined-up way, beyond just opens and clicks,” he said. “We want to have a look at, actually is it a print subscription that we should be pushing towards them, or an app subscription, or even a podcast?”

This will allow for greater personalization of the newsletters, from recommended content in the newsletter itself to optimizing content above the fold according to interest. The team will explore using machine learning to predict the likelihood of readers to subscribe or churn.

Nash’s final takeaway was that regardless of the sophistication of a publisher’s tech or tools, there is a lot that can easily be tested for proof-of-concept when it comes to newsletters. “There’s no right or wrong time to test things, or a right or wrong scale,” he said. “Now is the best time you can do that.”