It does not matter how great a product is if customers aren’t using it, Greg Piechota, lead of INMA’s Readers First Initiative, said during the recent Subscriber Retention Master Class.

“We sell a subscription, but it doesn’t mean that people actually use the product,” Piechota said. “Is the product actually helping people form a habit?”

During the master class, leaders from Advance Local, Badische Zeitung, and DC Thomson shared how their companies are taking steps to ensure customers are more deeply engaging with their products.

Advance Local uses newsletters to deepen engagement and boost retention

Advance Local has long recognised the power of newsletters as a tool for engaging readers. With more than 200 newsletters across its 10 markets, newsletters are a core part of its audience strategy — from growing e-mail lists to converting readers into subscribers.

As Craig Valenz, senior director of e-mail and newsletter marketing, and his team audited the company’s newsletter portfolio, they noticed a gap: Only four newsletters were exclusively for paying subscribers. Data revealed subscribers who received these exclusive newsletters retained 35% better than those who didn’t.

“It told us there was something here,” Valenz said. “Newsletters could be more than just traffic drivers — they could be part of the product.”

In 2024, Advance Local launched a formal strategy focused on subscriber-exclusive newsletters built to deliver meaningful value and deepen loyalty.

Although the team was optimistic about its new approach, the premium newsletter strategy has exceeded expectations, starting “first and foremost with retention,” Valenz said.

Paying subscribers who receive these newsletters are retaining up to 58% better than those who don’t. Engagement is also impressive, with open rates peaking at 74%, and click rates hitting 25%. Finally, the subscriber base for these newsletters has grown rapidly. By early 2025, more than 41,000 paying subscribers were receiving them — a 142% increase year over year.

“That showed us not only those receiving them were retaining and engaging, but there was also a demand,” Valenz said. “We’re building the list, and obviously our goal is to expand that as much as possible.”

Badische Zeitung engages subscribers with hyper-local app

What does it take to sell one of the most expensive digital news subscriptions in Germany?

For Badische Zeitung, the answer wasn’t more news. It was more usefulness.

Markus Hofmann, head of digital content, said the company’s app BZ Lieblingsplätze (“Favourite Places”), a local leisure guide, — not only engages users but has helped redefine the value of a digital subscription.

“The idea of the app is not to be a search engine,” Hofmann explained. “It’s about being a discovering engine with lots of inspiration. A giant insider tip machine with knowledge and recommendations not available via search engines or AI chatbots.”

Launched in April 2024, BZ Lieblingsplätze is built on a mix of curated editorial content and community contributions. The newsroom was invited to write about places they visit in their leisure time, and readers were also encouraged to contribute.

“We invited our readers to tell us their favourite places and to contribute pictures … this way, we got several hundreds of pictures,” Hofmann said.

Today, BZ Lieblingsplätze includes more than 2,500 points of interest and over 200 themed listicles, covering everything from dog-friendly outings and family hikes to the best local spots for Sunday cake or children’s birthday parties.

DC Thomson turns sports fans into subscribers

When Scottish regional news publisher DC Thomson saw that its digital subscription growth had plateaued, Graham McDougall, the company’s head of digital subscriptions, started to panic.

“We were selling less and churning more,” McDougall said, adding that the company also had a large sports audience that was frustratingly unwilling to convert. “As a sports fan, this probably sat with me longer than it did with others.”

When McDougall started to explore solutions, he remembered a user comment from a football highlights programme DC Thomson had run a few years back. The user, a football fan, had said that he “just didn’t want the other fluff around,” regarding the publication's regular local news stream.

The team launched Sport Pack in January 2024 at half the price of a standard subscription and gained 2,000 subscribers in its first year.

“There are no puzzles, no news, nothing but sports,” McDougall said.

DC Thomson now sees twice the retention rates on Sport Pack compared to its regular news pack, despite offering less content. The level of engagement is three to four times higher. McDougall suspects that it might be because offering limited content gives the reader a chance to read all of it.

Another key, McDougall said, is that sports coverage is just inherently different and deserves to be treated differently from general news coverage. After all, sports offer hope and excitement in a way that news coverage is just not able to: “It’s really that sports is tapping into a passion.”

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