Torstar drives audience engagement with news alerts
Newsroom Transformation Initiative Blog | 14 October 2024
As director of newsletters at Torstar, David Topping oversees both newsletters and news alerts. During the INMA Webinar How to use newsletters effectively to grow audience loyalty, he shared the nuances of news alerts and their effect on audience engagement.
First, he said, it was essential to distinguish between newsletters and news alerts: “I think of a newsletter as an editorial package of some sorts, and I think of an alert as a single story that’s oriented around driving traffic,” he said, adding the simplicity of alerts make them a “pure way to measure their success.”
Determining whether newsletters are working is a more significant challenge than measuring the success of alerts.
“A newsletter, maybe it works because it works really well to retain subscribers or maybe it works really well because it drives a lot of clicks,” he said. The effectiveness of alerts is easier to gauge, primarily through the clicks they generate.
The role of e-mail
As the delivery vehicle for newsletters and alerts, Torstar’s e-mail communications are crucial to the success of operations. Topping said the e-mails serve four main purposes:
- Driving subscriptions.
- Increasing traffic.
- Generating direct ad revenue.
- Retaining subscribers.
Topping emphasised that while retention is challenging to quantify, the first three functions are vital for revenue generation. He said an analysis conducted in 2023 revealed that those three functions contributed equally to the revenue from their e-mail programme.
“So we give them equal weight right now and all of them are growing,” he said.
Torstar only started selling ads for the newsletters about a year ago because it was important to build up a healthy overall newsletter programme before monetising them.
Winning over audiences with alerts
Torstar uses different types of alerts, and Topping explained that each type works slightly differently.
Breaking news alerts are a significant focus, as they are “really good at driving traffic.” However, they are less effective at generating subscriptions or direct ad revenue, Topping said.
Most people who get the alerts aren’t subscribers, so Torstar is continually working to convert those users.
“Just to emphasise, this is the biggie. We have about as many people sign up for these as pretty much everything else together,” he said. “This is what gets newsroom attention day in and day out.” The newsroom manually curates the alerts.
In contrast, investigation alerts, particularly those centred on crime investigations, have proven more successful in driving subscriptions. These alerts cater to readers keenly interested in ongoing stories and significant developments.
“In the days of print, following an ongoing investigation over the course of many months or years was pretty easy. It’s not anymore,” Topping explained, noting investigations can “unfold in unpredictable ways.”
By signing up for investigative news alerts, readers can learn new facts in cases as soon as they are available. He said people sign up based on specific stories or investigations because they “want to know the next big piece of the story.”
For example, Torstar has led the coverage of the death of a billionaire couple in their mansion. The investigation, Topping said, was “bungled from the start,” with police initially declaring it a murder/suicide.
“None of the evidence pointed to [that], and now it’s being investigated as a double homicide. As you can imagine, reader interest is really high … but it might be weeks or even months between stories,” Topping said. However when those stories are published and the news alerts go out, “they convert people exceptionally well.”
A third type of alert is columnist alerts, which are automated and tied to specific authors. These alerts drive consistent traffic and some subscriptions, although Topping noted the maintenance effort required for them:
“I think if we had to start from zero, I don’t know that I would focus on doing these,” he said. “I don’t regret that they’re there now, but the work to keep them up, to maintain them, to change them as new columnists leave and join us, is probably better spent elsewhere.”
Special event alerts, such as medal alerts during the Olympics and vaccine rollout alerts, were also highlighted for their success in driving high traffic during their respective periods. However, neither were particularly successful in driving subscriptions.
Lessons learned
Topping candidly shared the challenges and learnings from their alert strategies. He mentioned that certain alert types — neighbourhood-based alerts based on news in a certain geographical area, and recurring feature alerts, which notified users on a new story in categories such as health or business — did not perform well and were subsequently discontinued.
Topping also shared three “surprises” Torstar discovered through its work with alerts:
- Breaking news alerts aren’t strong drivers for converting to subscriptions, although they are exceptional at driving traffic.
- Volume and clicks are closely related and show that users have a high tolerance for push notifications: “These are people who’ve signed up to get these breaking news alerts, and their tolerance for news in their inbox is already really high.”
- Some topics don’t translate well to alerts, such as sports, arts, local crime, international news, and — now — COVID-19 news.
Topping said his biggest takeaway for news media companies is they must understand the importance of adapting alert strategies based on performance data to optimise their effectiveness.