Up to 70% opening rate – Swedish group NTM’s bet on hyperlocal newsletters

The Swedish group NTM – a conglomerate of 16 different local media with around 300 journalists – started to develop hyperlocal newsletters in 2023.

The group now offers 46 different types of newsletters, ranging from “This is going on in your city?” to sports and crime. All of these newsletters are hyperlocal, and the format is an automated compilation based on metadata such as article topic tags and geographical boundaries. Then, one person checks that everything is good before the final sending.

Providing readers with content that reflects their individuality, personalised to their interests and location, was a winning bet for the NTM group – particularly in smaller communities where people are less likely to see stories about their area on newspaper front pages.

Some newsletters have now reached almost a 70% open rate, with nearly 20,000 people subscribing.

The Fix spoke with Jens Pettersson, head of editorial development at NTM.

How did everything start?

A couple of years ago, we started out doing two weekly newsletters, which were curated automatically by metadata like news value, readers engagement, and start and stop times. Then after a while, we realised that we needed to try out more hyperlocal or superlocal content.

Since we are close to the audience in our neighbourhoods, we wanted to try out niche newsletters, which were very specific on certain topics.

So this is how the idea of ​​hyper-local newsletters was born?

Yes, we launched the first-year niched newsletters in 2023. We started out doing some different topics, like super local newsletters for things like the city or the vicinity that you belong to. In these small cities, articles about them tend to drown on the front page of the website because there is always bigger news from the bigger cities. So this was a way to ensure discovery of those articles that were about your own neighbourhood.

Then we also went into sports, trying to just do newsletters on the biggest teams in that vicinity. We also did crime and something called “This is going on in the city?”, which focused on restaurants and cafes, opening and closing those, or new shops in the city. It’s not some kind of fancy quality journalism, but something that we see is super engagement in the audience around. They are so curious about these kinds of topics.

How many newsletters do you have today, and what are your results?

Right now we have 46 different spreads out of those 16 newsrooms. We have an opening rate of 56% for sports, with a click-through rate (CTR) of 13%. For the local ones, we have a 69% opening rate and a 13% CTR. For “This is going on in the city”, we have a 65% opening rate and 22% CTR. And for crime, we have 57% in the opening rate and 17% in CTR.

These numbers kind of surprised me. I think we can see quite good results.

How do you attract people to newsletters?

First of all, we try to send out the information that now you can subscribe to this. We also created these kinds of buttons and widgets incorporated into articles. So if the news article has the topic “this is going on in the city”, then it's going to be automatically a button to sign up for the newsletter for this newsletter. This has been tremendously good as a driver of subscriptions.

Did you face any challenges?

Those newsletters are produced totally automatically. But what we very quickly learnt when we tried this out is that we need to send a copy of the newsletter…one hour in advance to the newsroom to give them a chance to check the content in the newsletter.

And if they find an article that should not be in that newsletter, they need to go into the CMS and change the metadata for the topic tag and make sure it gets excluded from the newsletter. You need the human in the loop to correct some difficulties.

Is this also a strategy to increase engagement and subscriptions?

It doesn’t cost anything to subscribe to our newsletters. But inside, there's like a picture for each article with a headline and a short intro to the article. If you click on it, you will need to subscribe to be able to read the article itself.

So our strategy is very focused upon making both money on subscriptions and advertising. Since a lot of money has floated away to the big tech giants, we need high speed for reinvention or developing the stuff we do to connect the readers more.

So creating these newsletters was like getting one more touchpoint with our customers instead of depending on other kinds of distribution channels like Google.

What are your goals for the future?

We hope for continuous growth. At the moment we have around 17,284 subscribers, and I think we started out this year at 12,000. This year, we have a goal of 20,000 subscribers to these kinds of niche newsletters.

Source of the cover photo: Diana Light via Unsplash