13 August 2026

Lessons in turning newsletters into subscription engines

Dating back to Roman Times, the humble newsletter has not only endured but has grown in relevance and importance. Bypassing unpredictable algorithms and social media toxicity, newsletters establish a direct, owned connection with audiences, who see them as a highly trusted source of information. And big publishers have taken note.

At last count, The Guardian has more than 50 newsletters, The Economist has 24, and the Financial Times more than 40. For Bloomberg – who has accelerated its consumer subscriptions business by rolling out 30 new newsletters – moving much of the portfolio behind a paywall has seen it grow to three million unique subscribers by 2025, up 26% year-on-year.

“Newsletters, which have been around for so long, are really starting to become one of our most powerful subscription engagement tools and even products within themselves,” said Chris Sopher, co-Founder & CEO of Letterhead, speaking at this year’s PPA Festival in London.

“One of the most impactful things you can do is push your organisation away from thinking – we have one newsletter and that checks a box. Rather, look at it as a channel that has a variety of potential applications, and determine which ones are right for you. Ideally, have multiple newsletters, each with their own strategy.

“Newsletters are still thought of in a last-generation kind of way as a distribution mechanism for our links to drive traffic. That’s not wrong as an objective – it’s just not the only one.”

Joined by an expert panel, Sopher chaired a session that shared newsletter strategies driving measurable results – whether leveraging email to convert and retain subscribers, or building paid-for subscription offers that include newsletters as a key part of the package.

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Positive reviews

Since 2021, evergreen consumer champion Which? has greatly expanded its newsletter portfolio, growing it into a significant format and channel. The near-70-year-old brand now has 12 free email newsletters as well as an exclusive member-only one.

According to Jenni Allen, Director of Content at Which?, newsletters have helped to tap into non-subscribers who visit the brand’s website and access free content.

“Essentially we have no ongoing ability to have a relationship with them, so the idea really was that we’ve got to somehow harness that opportunity and that kind of traffic,” she said. “And actually, we didn’t really know exactly what the value was going to be.”

“Once you have an audience, you can definitely start to understand and exploit the value exchange that can happen. We have about 900,000 non-member subscribers to our newsletters, and it’s become a very good engine for acquisition.”

Allen revealed that about a third of Which’s new subscribers in 2025 were acquired through its newsletter audience.

“That’s partly also because it’s very valuable in terms of our lapsed members,” she explained. “So, when our members leave us, they’re still taking our free newsletters and it’s a great way to re-engage – often with win-back campaigns and some quite targeted activity as well.”

The biggest surprise for Allen has been how powerful newsletters are for paying members as well.

“We have a half million paying members and 400,000 of them take at least one newsletter – many of them take many more than that,” she said. “It’s just a huge opportunity for us to deliver regular value to them. And I think when you’re asking people to pay you on a monthly or an annual basis you’ve got to give them something of regular utility.

“Given that the core of what we do are reviews, people aren’t necessarily looking for that kind of information day in, day out. You’ve got to work hard to have a place in that subscription share of wallets and that regular utility. So, the newsletters have been really important in member retention as well.”

Allen stressed the importance of being a trusted brand that people want to engage with when it comes to any successful newsletter strategy.

“When you haven’t looked at the email for a while and you get the question whether you want to unsubscribe, you want those people to say no,” she said.

“It’s an ongoing challenge as a publisher how you reassert your place in people’s finite amount of content consumption, and brand presence is really important.”

Read all about it

Launched in 2024, digital newspaper The Londoner is an essential part of the Mill Media network’s mission to bring back local journalism through engaging American magazine-style features. It’s strategy that’s heavily email led.

“All of our pieces are emailed first. If you subscribe, you subscribe as an e-mail reader,” said Hannah Williams, Editor of The Londoner. “We have a subscription model as well, which is also email led. And we have a web element – everything goes on a nice glossy website. But email is the primary delivery method. It’s the way that most of our readers are reading our content.

“The web, in a lot of ways, supports the email. It’s about getting people to sign up for that kind of mechanism. We also use our web to foster comments and community, which is again focused around people finding something in their inbox and how they interact with it that way.”

One of the challenges facing The Londoner is determining which content works best for a free email audience.

“We have a funnel model where the free list grows the paid list,” Williams pointed out. “In terms of the content that’s in those emails, you have to think about what’s the story that would get really good shares on social, or that people are going to forward it to each other.

“What’s something where people, if they’re on the free list, will be like: oh, I really need to read that? Because you’re going to put the paywall at a certain point before the juicy detail to get people hooked in.”

Part of finding the right content for email newsletter is knowing what its limits are when it comes to breaking news. While The Londoner has a ‘Monday briefing’ – rounding up all the news from the weekend and looking forward to what’s happening that week, the big breaking stories are left to the website.

“We’re not breaking news, because I think it’s impossible to do that,” Williams explained. “I think it’s quite difficult to break news in any sense through a newsletter just because that’s more for a website where you can do live updates. If you e-mail something out that’s a breaking story and probably going to have a lot of updates, it’s going to be old news within a couple of hours.

“So, we do break scoops (on the website) and we deviate from our publishing pattern when that is happening and when there’s something urgent that we do want to get out. But the kind of content people want from an email newsletter is different to what they can get from the BBC website, for example.”

In terms of promoting newsletters beyond their own website, The Londoner has found that creating a community through quality content has been absolutely essential.

“We’ve used paid ads on Meta platforms, on Facebook and Instagram, and sometimes they perform really well, but we’ve found that people convert onto our paid list at a much slower rate if they came from a paid advert than they do if they came through organic means,” revealed Williams.

“For us, you cannot divorce it from the content. If somebody reads something that they think is insightful or engaging or beautiful about their city they want to share that with their friends and their loved ones – they want them to sign up to the newsletter.”

Horses for courses

At last count, FT Specialist – the division of the Financial Times that has 16 brands delivering global insight to audience groups like personal investors, financial advisers and banking professionals – had more than 430,00 subscribers. Playing a crucial role across all their operations, are newsletters.

“We have a number of different models, a number of different strategies, but we don’t have a product where newsletters are not a really central part of what we’re trying to do,” said Andrew Lee, Head of Marketing and Sales Operations at FT Specialist.

“What we often do now is publish different versions of our newsletters. So, it depends on what relationship you have with us. If you’ve only signed up to a newsletter, perhaps we’ll give you a slimmed down version with less content in that newsletter compared to what a paid-for subscriber might have.

“So that’s the way we’ve developed our model. Everybody’s on the list, but the actual experience that you get depends on your cohort status.”

One the biggest changes FT Specialist has undergone is the way it looks at anonymous traffic.

“We publish a lot of content and get a lot of anonymous traffic. In the past we would regard the newsletter as being an incentive to create an account,” said Lee.

“But we’ve changed our thinking now in light of recent developments that we need to capture these users and bring them into the known funnel as quickly as we can. Very specifically we do things like allowing customers to sign up in the middle of an article, nice and frictionless.

“They just give us an e-mail where previously we would have thought at that moment of value exchange we need to capture much more about you. It’s increasingly about moving them through the funnel, understanding who they are and use the newsletter to engage them.”

Lee admits FT Specialist has in the past been guilty of “interrupting people’s reading flow” with pop-ups.

“These were not terribly contextual invitations to sign up to newsletters,” he said. “We’ve actually done a lot of work to really try and integrate that sort of acquisition into email, into the content experience – and it’s really paid dividends.

“We’ve now got within a CMS module, editable email sign up components that the individual content creators can situate at the most appropriate part of the article. It’s obviously heavily contextual and requires very little in terms of data exchange.

We then also present them with the opportunity to sign up to another newsletter, just by clicking a single button.

“You’re getting a double dip because once they’ve actually gone to the effort of putting their e-mail in, it’s quite easy to say, oh yeah, that one looks interesting as well.”