Make everyone feel seen and heard, serve them the information they’re interested in, and strategically target certain geographic locations underserved by big media companies: these are the goals of a hyper-local newsletter launched by NTM in Sweden.

NTM believed it could offer readers increased value by allowing them to customise their news experience – and that it would increase engagement along the way. 

Made to order

NTM also thought the newsletter’s customisation element could help gauge readers’ interests and serve them more content across its brands. It decided to automate the suggested content by tagging specific topics and geographies.

For example, its dining and entertainment newsletter automatically gathers the week’s newspaper articles with tags for terms including restaurant, cafe, bar, concert, revue, theatre, art, comedy, nightlife, and music. NTM has two specific newsletters for dining and entertainment, two about sports, one on crime and punishment, and several based on geography.  

It is experimenting with geo-targeting its newsletters in a very strategic way, focusing on areas where its daily print newspaper has reduced distribution and includes the most important news from the reader’s local area. NTM is seeing success with the strategy in smaller locations where readers don’t typically see stories from their area on the front pages of newspapers. 

NTM knows that launching these super small and niche newsletters wouldn’t bring in a massive number of subscriptions, but it was more interested in engagement and the significance for those who chose to subscribe to them, and more focused on the value the reader saw in the newsletter popping into their inbox filled with stories they cared deeply about. For NTM, the mission was always about building and strengthening its relationship with its readers, creating that loyalty and, in turn, generating reader revenue. It has tested not only topics and geography, but also elements like which day of the week and what time of day is best to deliver their newsletters.

What NTM learned

The average open rate of the eight different newsletters is 66%, and its best-performing newsletter exceeds a 70% open rate. This indicates that NTM’s high engagement and high-value proposition goals are being met.

The click-through rate from the newsletters to the NTM Web site sits at an average of 16%, and its best-performing newsletter has a CTR of more than 25%. In one month,  5,630 users signed up for the hyper-local newsletters. In all, it now has 102,000 digital subscribers. 

The newsletter with the most audience engagement with about crime and punishment, which compiles the most critical crime news NTM has published over the previous week.

It has also been able to flex its tech infrastructure by leaning on automation to generate new newsletters, which allows it to consistently create and test new topics and geographic areas with minimal effort.

The first eight newsletters were such a success for NTM that it added 22 more topics and areas in 2024, giving it a total of 30 hyperlocal newsletters every week.

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