You Are Not Alone, Sarah Ebner’s newsletter tells Telegraph readers
The Telegraph’s Head of Editorial Newsletters talks to us about strategy — from her own newsletter pop-up, to the 50+ newsletters she oversees in the London-based newsroom.
Hi all, and happy Thursday. We hope you’re holding up okay. If you’re reading this, we wanted to start off by saying thank you. We so appreciate your interest and time spent reading these posts. We have a blast interviewing newsletter-makers and writing up these posts, so it makes us happy that we’re seeing others following along, too! We’ve published our first set of posts, but now we’re curious: are there any newsletters or newsletter-makers you’d like to know more about? Tell us by sending us an email at newsletterwizards@gmail.com. Or, if you are a newsletter-maker yourself, please send us a hello with an example to one of your newsletters — we’d love to take a look.
Sarah Ebner is the head of editorial newsletters at the Telegraph, the British daily newspaper published in London. How many editorial newsletters does the Telegraph produce, you might be wondering? Over 50. (You can check all of them out here).
Somehow, Sarah also had time to launch and write You Are Not Alone, a new weekday pop-up newsletter that helps readers navigate feelings of isolation by sharing stories about community spirit, advice, and upbeat news. We interviewed Sarah to learn more about the thinking behind You Are Not Alone, and to get a sense of how the Telegraph’s portfolio of newsletters is performing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Newsletter Wizards: Tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been at The Telegraph, and how long have you been working on newsletter strategy?
Sarah: I’ve been a journalist for some decades — my first journalism job, also in a national newspaper, was pre-internet, back in the 1990s (yes, I realize that makes me old!) and I’ve worked on newspapers, magazines, television and digital. I first set up a newsletter when I worked for the London Times and launched Times Woman, which was a bespoke email for our female readers covering anything from politics to sport. It showcased female writers across the Times and Sunday Times with an exclusive column each week. That was in 2015.
I went on to launch a daily lunchtime news briefing while at my next job, as deputy editor of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, before joining The Telegraph in June 2018 to be their first-ever head of editorial newsletters. I head up a team of three and our aim is to enhance loyalty and engagement and also lead to subscriptions. We have increased these hugely since starting, and now newsletters lead thousands of readers to take out Telegraph subscriptions each month.
Newsletter Wizards: What are some of your personal favorite newsletters?
Sarah: I have a number of favorite newsletters. Obviously, within the Telegraph, I like all of them pretty much! If I had to pick just a few, I’d go for our Matt newsletter and the royal one. Matt is our brilliant cartoonist and each week he tells us about what’s been happening, what inspired his sketches, and shares an unseen cartoon too. This newsletter has an 80 percent open rate. I also really like Your Royal Appointment, which is a brilliant royal briefing. It has two exclusive columns in it and also gives readers the chance to ask our associate editor (and royal expert) a question. These have ranged from what tea the Queen likes, to what his grandchildren call Prince Charles.
Outside The Telegraph I think Dave Pell does a great job and also like David Leonhardt, but have to get used to reading him in the morning now.
Newsletter Wizards: Tell us a bit about your pop-up newsletter, You Are Not Alone. What is it about; who does it serve; and, why?
Sarah: We launched our You Are Not Alone section in response to the coronavirus pandemic. It was set up to promote supportive, sharing stories; to try to bring people together, and to promote content that would be useful at this difficult time. I thought that it made perfect sense to launch an accompanying newsletter and particularly wanted to be able to use it as a tool to reach people directly, share their stories, and also cheer them up.
Newsletter Wizards: Neat! Could you elaborate on your initial strategy for the make-up of this specific newsletter? How did you decide on the newsletter’s structure, tone, and imagery? Who was involved in making these choices?
Sarah: The strategy was to get the newsletter out quickly to the right people and then continue to promote it similarly. I knew it should have an editor’s note at the top and links to our You Are Not Alone content online. This would be useful to the reader and help to drive visits to the site, as well as lead to subscriptions, as much of our content is paywalled.
I wanted a “things to cheer you up” section so [that] there was an actual place for laughs, funny tweets, musical interludes, and more. This is very much reflective of the things I like or find funny. There’s a lot of music, and that’s because I am a music fan. I’ve had really good feedback on this section.
I thought that, although I mention community stories elsewhere in the newsletter, it would be good to have a specific “community spirit” section, and I asked our digital news editor if there was someone who was across these stories in particular. She suggested Helena Horton, one of our reporters, so that became her section (she files to me and I edit and build that section, and indeed, the whole newsletter).
The bottom part was originally a kind of jumbled list of other things we had going on, but my boss, Dan Silver, suggested making it an “expert” area, and that made sense to me, so it’s where I promote other newsletters or our daily Q&As. I like the fact that the newsletter is very clear — you know what you’re getting in each section.
The tone of the newsletter just comes from me really, but the initial design was from our brilliant designers who just know how to make things look good but simple. I also spoke to our marketing team right at the start of this, and they helped design the thumbnail which we use on the newsletter’s sign-up page and also sent out a marketing email to readers we thought would engage with this particular newsletter.
Newsletter Wizards: What have you noticed about your audience response to the newsletter strategy you’ve chosen?
Sarah: The [You Are Not Alone] newsletter has a high engagement rate, and I get a lot of feedback which is great. [Editor’s note: Sarah later told us that this newsletter has an action rate — or the percent of readers clicking through to the articles — of about 30%.] I have put in my own email address, and I ask specific questions — like “what have you done to entertain yourself in lockdown?” — which I think encourages people to get in contact.
On our terrific Brexit Bulletin newsletter, we have a simple module with a box that says “Are you enjoying Brexit Bulletin?” and then a button saying “Email us your feedback.” This simple question is very effective, and we get huge amounts of feedback on this newsletter.
In general, I want our readers to feel they can contact our newsletter writers to ask questions or share thoughts. It should be a two-way street: you can always learn from your readers! We launched a reader survey in You Are Not Alone, and across a number of other newsletters, to see what we might be doing well, or not so well, and on the first day a few readers told me the survey was simply too long, so we cut the length down.
Newsletter Wizards: What metrics are you finding most helpful in tracking your newsletter success?
Sarah: When it comes to metrics, like all newsletter writers and editors I look at open rate and action rate (more than click-through rate). I am well aware that open rate does not tell you the whole story when it comes to engagement, and we have introduced some new metrics which show high and low levels of engagement.
I think these can shed a lot of light when it comes to measuring the success of a newsletter, but I also think that a newsletter with a high open rate is definitely doing something right and appealing to many people. [Editor’s note: Sarah later shared that the average open rate across all Telegraph newsletters is 36 percent, and acknowledged that open rates do not tell the whole story. See the Newsletter Guide section on Email Metrics and Health for more information on assessing newsletter performance.]
Newsletter Wizards: And how are these metrics changing in response to the pandemic?
Sarah: When it comes to the pandemic, we have seen that overall our open rates have gone up, and our action rates too. We took our monthly Puzzles newsletter weekly, and that’s been a big success. We’ve also seen high engagement particularly with our Gardening newsletter (over 70 percent open rate on a registration newsletter) and Cookbook. We have had a Global Health newsletter, with an expert team for over two years, and they have been brilliant during this pandemic, providing endless information. We took their weekly newsletter daily, and it has been a huge success, with a much-increased list and also a higher open rate (not the most common occurrence!).
In the last month, we have also launched another new newsletter, In Other News, which is entirely non-coronavirus related. It’s weekly and already proving successful. We saw that lots of people were starting to search for non-COVID-19 content on the Telegraph site.
Newsletter Wizards: In what ways do you think the pandemic is changing norms, rules, and ideas of what constitutes a good newsletter?
Sarah: I think that newsletters are having a moment during the pandemic as they work well for people in isolation, and can make readers feel like part of a community or as if they are having a conversation with someone, even when alone (I always think of You Are Not Alone as showing that physical isolation does not mean complete isolation). I think that the personal touch becomes even more important and so does sharing information. We get regular messages from people thanking us for keeping them informed, including on subjects other than the coronavirus, whether culture or politics.
Newsletter Wizards: The Telegraph has been around for a very long time, so we know your newsroom is not new to adaptation! How do you see newsletters fitting into The Telegraph’s future?
Sarah: Newsletters, both editorial and non-editorial, are key to the Telegraph’s future, as they epitomize the direct relationship between the organization and [the] individual and are not ruled by any kind of algorithm or owned by anyone (like Facebook, Snap or Twitter). They are fundamental to the overall objective of increasing subscribers to 1 million by 2023, as we know that subscribers who read newsletters are more likely to keep subscribing and that registrants who sign up for newsletters are more likely to subscribe. We always need to adapt and are looking at personalization and an improved sign-up process, but I think newsletters are the great survivors of the digital world. Long may that continue.
Long live newsletters, indeed.
This is the fifth post in the Sign Me Up! series, a project that talks directly with newsletter-makers about their newsletters, and these days, specifically COVID-19 newsletters. This interview has been lightly edited for brevity. You can read the most recent post featuring Delia Cai’s daily media newsletter Deez Links, here.
