Wednesday 24th July: Podcast and newsletter lessons from leading publishers

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Esther.

Groupe Sud Ouest, one of France’s largest regional publishers, had a wealth of great content, but achieving their ambitious newsletter subscription targets proved a challenge with their existing email setup.

Learn how they used Echobox Email’s AI-automation to personalize their newsletters and grow subscriptions by 400% while saving 80 hours per week. All in less than a year.

Newsletters and podcasts have a lot in common. As well as being low-cost, they can be intimate and personal; perfect for building lasting relationships with readers and listeners.

Neither format is new, but as it becomes increasingly more challenging to reach and engage people online, publishers are seeing the opportunities they offer for more sustainable audience-building. That’s one of the reasons we put on a dual-stream Podcast and Newsletter Summit aimed at publishers in London last month.

This special episode in collaboration with journalism.co.uk brings out some of the key lessons and learnings from the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summits. There are clips from some of the stage sessions, as well as exclusive interviews with Jon Young, Publisher at Reby Media, Sarah Ebner, Head of Newsletters at the Financial Times, and Rosalind Erskin, host of The Scotsman’s Scran podcast.

I’m writing this on the train back home (dedication!) having had a fab afternoon/evening celebrating some superb publisher newsletters. Expect to hear from some of the winners in our upcoming relaunched season, and huge congratulations to everyone who was shortlisted - some formidable competition.

This news broke too late for us to include in yesterday’s edition but if you haven’t seen it yet, there’s been a collective industry WTF as Google has announced they’re not getting rid of third party cookies at all, despite beginning a phase out in January. Users will be asked to opt in or out though, and we can all predict how that will go; they’re essentially making consumers force the changes through.

Tobi Oredein was 24 when she launched Black Ballad while living with her mother. It was a free-to-access blog which simply aspired to give a space to black women to write and feel heard. Ten years later, Black Ballad is a healthy, lifestyle media business with multiple lines of revenue including 1,500 paying members, regular lucrative partnerships with global brands, a first-party data collection strategy and approximately 15 events a year up and down the country.

More from Media Voices