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Newsletter marketing strategies from Metro.co.uk and The Spectator

“No matter how good your product is, or how good you think your product is, newsletters don’t grow by themselves,” said Metro.co.uk’s Newsletter Editor Sophie Laughton at the Publisher Newsletter Summit, held in London in June.

The Publisher Summits covered four product areas across two days in London, from newsletters and print to apps and podcasts, featuring speakers from The Economist and Financial Times to Reach, National World, Grazia and more.

The need to market newsletters was a common theme which came up across the Publisher Newsletter Summit. Two sessions in particular focused on strategies for newsletter marketing and discovery, which you can hear in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast.

Sophie Laughton, Newsletter Editor at Metro.co.uk shared how a site redesign helped their newsletter team drive newsletter sign-ups, and how they approached prioritising newsletter marketing. Hannah Tomes, US Production Editor at The Spectator also took to the stage to discuss which marketing and growth strategies have and haven’t worked for their own newsletter portfolio.

Here, we round-up some of the best newsletter marketing strategies and advice from their talks.

1: Capturing audiences at the right point

In November 2024, daily news site Metro.co.uk underwent a redesign to bring the digital edition in line with changed audience expectations. The newsletter team were a part of this process, which involved an evaluation of what was and wasn’t going well with the existing newsletter process.

A key part of successful newsletter marketing is capturing readers when they’re most likely to sign up. Laughton explained that if someone comes to a newsletter sign-up page ‘cold’, then it’s unlikely they’re going to understand what it’s about and why they should sign up to it.

Metro has focused on flexible call-to-actions and sign-up points across the website that can be served to relevant pages and articles. One example their travel newsletter, The Getaway. Promotions for the newsletter are put at the end of all travel-related content, as well as sidebar widgets. “These are quite successful, they drive about 14% of all our sign-ups last month,” Laughton shared.

For those who don’t reach the end of an article, the site redesign has also allowed the team to put ‘fact box’ style call-to-actions (CTAs) to various newsletters, appearing earlier on. These are constantly iterated and copy can be changed quickly around certain events, for example a gaming newsletter promotion which changed the copy to focus on the Switch launch to capture fly-by interest.

“These have been really, really successful…almost 50% of new on-site sign-ups last week came from these in-article links,” said Laughton, noting that they were easy to tweak and experiment with. “You’ve got to make sure that you’re putting the sign-up points to them at a moment when they are actually interested in what you’ve got to offer.”

The newsletter team have also recently begun trialling overlays, which show up when users have been on site for a certain amount of time. These have shown early success, driving nearly 1,000 sign-ups in May 2025 alone.

“You need to diversify your touchpoints,” Laughton advised, when it comes to on-site newsletter marketing. “We have as many options as we can, and we’re always looking at more options so that we can reach people at different stages as they read our content, so when they’re most amenable to signing up, there’s an option for them to do so.”

The Spectator’s Hannah Tomes acknowledged that there could be challenges when it came to prioritising newsletters online. “It can be an internal fight about what goes on the homepage,” she said. “But making sure [newsletters] are really visible on the website, making sure people know where to find things, and also making sure people aren’t being bombarded with things they’ve already seen is something we’re working on.”

2: Automated opt-ins

The Spectator have been trialling a marketing method which might raise eyebrows with some, but which makes sense if done well. Alongside their flagship news and politics themed newsletters, they also have emails dedicated to property and interiors, economics, books and more. The Take Away, which won Best Food & Drink Newsletter at 2024’s Publisher Newsletter Awards, covers the best of the publication’s food and drink coverage, as well as recipes from The Vintage Chef Olivia Potts.

“If you read food and drink content and you’re a logged-in subscriber on the website, we set the threshold to four articles a week of food and drink-related content…we will start sending you the Food and Drink newsletter if you don’t already receive it,” Tomes explained. 

“We make it really clear at the top, this is why you’ve been added to this list: you’ve opted in to receive newsletters, and we can see that you’ve read a lot of food and drink content. So perhaps you didn’t know but we have a food and drink newsletter.”

Tomes said that although it was a bold strategy, they have very few unsubscribes. Registered users are a powerful but often under-utilised segment when it comes to newsletter marketing, with publishers able to showcase or sample relevant newsletters to those showing interest in similar content online.

3: Cross-promotion

Recent studies have found that retention increases with the number of newsletters a subscriber signs up for. Making sure cross-promotion is included as part of a marketing strategy is a straightforward way of boosting lists of smaller newsletters, as well as ensuring subscribers are aware of a range of offerings.

“At Metro we have about 15 newsletters, and we always want to make sure that people are signed up to as many as possible,” Laughton explained. “We put cross-sells within all our newsletters. So whenever there’s a crossover in content, we’re making sure that people are aware there’s another newsletter they might be interested in reading.”

This cross-promotion isn’t just contained within newsletters. The team have enabled targeted overlays if a reader is signed up to one newsletter, but are reading topics on-site related to another newsletter.

Cross-promotion is also an effective marketing tool for The Spectator. “We quite often advertise for different newsletters that we have on the bigger ones,” Tomes said, noting that this was one of their most effective growth strategies internally. “Our politics [newsletters] go to a lot of people, and a lot of them are interested in food and drink, they just didn’t know that we did a food and drink newsletter.”

Tomes sees cross-promotion as an easy win for publishers looking to level up their newsletter marketing. “It doesn’t take a long time to design a banner or even some in-email wording, as long as it’s eye-catching and interesting enough for people to think, ‘Oh, I haven’t heard of that, this sounds like something I’d really enjoy,’” she outlined.

4: Off-site strategies

Increasingly, the challenge for publishers is in reaching the right people at all, let alone effectively showcasing newsletters once they’re on site. “Organic reach can be limited and slow, “Laughton said. “You need to make sure that you’re boosting those sign-ups wherever you can.”

She cited a site-wide traffic drop at Metro which occurred just months after the redesign was implemented, causing early signs of growth to drop off. “When traffic is bad to your site, people just aren’t getting their eyes on your sign-up points, so sign-ups will drop,” she explained.

Instead, the Metro newsletter team decided to explore external platforms to boost growth. They looked at where they had a strong presence, and where they could highlight unique aspects of their newsletters.

The publisher has a large print circulation, where they decided to try promoting their Horoscopes newsletter. “We knew that our paper readers had a really, really high interest in horoscopes, [that section] is really popular with them,” said Laughton. “So we ran these full-page Horoscopes [newsletter] ads with QR codes, making it really easy for people to sign up directly from the newsletter.”

These have worked well for Metro. “Every time we ran them, they drove around 200 to 500 sign ups,” Laughton shared. 

The Spectator has also run adverts for their newsletters in their weekly magazine. “We’ve done some full-page ads in the magazine with QR codes that people can sign up to,” Tomes said. They’ve worked quite well. They’re not the most popular [method] because a lot of our readers are in a slightly older age bracket and not that into QR codes, but even just to raise awareness of the fact that it exists, it’s quite good.”

Both publishers have also experimented with marketing on social media. For Laughton at Metro, Facebook has had really mixed results, and she cautioned that high engagement on posts doesn’t necessarily translate to high conversion. The Hook Up, their weekly sex and dating newsletter, often does very well on Facebook, with posts driving a great deal of engagement. Laughton shared that around 23% of The Hook Up’s new newsletter subscribers come from Facebook every month.

But another post on Facebook from their Senior Politics Reporter Craig Munro, which gained thousands of reactions and comments online, translated to no new sign-ups. “We knew we needed to rethink a little bit, so we’re going to pivot away from Facebook for this particular list, and we’re going to look towards WhatsApp,” Laughton said, emphasising that marketing strategies on social media really vary by list type.

Tomes said that paid Facebook advertising has yielded results, especially for their political newsletters. She believes that’s because The Spectator is particularly strongly associated with politics and opinion. Her team have been experimenting with other platforms like Reddit, although she shared that X hasn’t worked at all for either article traffic or newsletter promotions.

Simplicity is key

Both Laughton and Tomes shared some advice for publishers looking to shape their newsletter marketing strategies. Laughton emphasised that keeping it as simple as possible is essential to optimising growth. “If it’s too difficult, or there are too many steps, you’re going to lose readers along the journey,” she said.

Prior to the redesign, Metro’s newsletter sign-ups were convoluted, and it was time-consuming to set up sign-up pages. “It was challenging to actually launch new newsletters and make sure that people could see them,” Laughton said, noting that new newsletters could take up to six months of development work and UX design to be ready. They also had inconsistency with sign-up pages and data collection across the portfolio.

Now, their newsletters are easy to launch, easy to sign up to and easy to produce, with the build and copy control in the hands of the newsletter team. Laughton recommended publishers wanting to improve sign-ups have an audit of their own newsletter sign-up points. “Look at the places where the journey is a little bit more difficult than it could be,” she advised, highlighting sign-up pages that could be clearer, or missed opportunities to promote newsletters. 

Tomes advised that getting a central preference centre working properly is essential. “One of the biggest [changes] for us has been making sure our preference centre works properly, and people can click through everything, and they’re not being signed up for stuff they don’t want, or being logged off things that they do want,” she outlined.

Keep experimenting and prioritising

The need for constant experimentation was highlighted by both publishers. Laughton noted that Metro’s redesign meant that they now had the flexibility and agility to run experiments at different scales, as well as iterate and try new things. “We’ve seen some really big results from some really small changes,” she said.

“You need to identify your own strengths and weaknesses. If you have a particular strength on a particular platform, that’s a really good place to start… Equally if you have a weak point, look at ways that you can improve it. Start testing, measuring, and refining.”

The Spectator carefully chooses where to prioritise marketing efforts, although it does give all newsletters a boost at launch. Tomes explained that their flagship Evening Blend newsletter has consistent growth, often through word-of-mouth in Westminster, so isn’t one they worry about marketing.

“The things we want to take off, we’ll put the same amount of advertising to them all to begin with, and see what works,” she said. “if one feels like it needs a bit more of a push, we’ll go for that, or if one’s doing particularly well in a certain area but not in another one, we’ll just drop the area that’s not doing well and push in the area that is doing well. 

“It’s good to be flexible with how you’re marketing newsletters, and what works for one won’t necessarily work for the others.”

Laughton’s parting advice was to remember that ultimately, success is about quality, not quantity. “You don’t just need an audience. You need the right audience,” she highlighted. “So it’s not just about anyone can sign up, it’s about finding the right people to sign up; working out where they are and working out what you need to do to make sure that you’re reaching those people.”

Listen to Sophie Laughton and Hannah Tomes’ sessions at The Publisher Summits on The Publisher Podcast on your podcast app of choice.

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