“It’s the one that has the best opening rate of our newsletters, and it’s something our competitors don’t deal with,” Fanny Bonjean, Head of Audience Engagement at Le Parisien, told participants during a WAN-IFRA webinar on “Topic-focused and Niche Newsletters.”

In a previous WAN-IFRA webinar from late 2020, Sophie Gourmelen, Managing Director and Publisher of Le Parisien, had shared how the publisher’s recently launched #LeParisien200000 digital transformation project was unfolding. A specific goal there is to reach 200,000 digital subscribers in five years.

Another part of the overall transformation project is around investing and embracing new technology (and data). Le Parisien also participated in the WAN-IFRA Table Stakes Europe programme in 2020.

Between 2019 and 2020, Le Parisien doubled its numbers of digital subscribers and its revenues from digital subscriptions largely through an effort to produce far more “premium” articles that are for subscribers only. The website now features a hybrid of metered and paywalled (premium) content.

Part of a commitment to its audience

The Buying Power newsletter is aimed at people who actually don’t have a lot of buying power and are looking for tips to help them better manage their budget and get more for their money, Bonjean said.

The newsletter also reflects Le Parisien’s commitment to its audience, which tends to be less affluent, she said.

Buying Power is a way to show readers that Le Parisien cares about the everyday issues that affect their lives and that the publisher is there to help them.

Sent twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, each edition of Buying Power, like all of Le Parisien’s newsletters, begins with an editorial note from the head of the relevant news department. In the case of Buying Power, the newspaper’s business editor writes the editorial.

“The first thing we do is to talk to our reader, and the newsletter comes to their mailbox, so it can be very intimate. We want to really reinforce that bond with the editorial,” Bonjean said, adding that the editorial note always includes the editor’s signature and picture.

“If you click on the picture, it sends you to the Twitter account of the journalist. This lets readers know that it is not a robot, there is a person talking to you, working for you,” she said. “That is why we put the signature and picture to the editorial.”

After the editorial, each newsletter contains several articles that Le Parisien puts in different shapes and different colours.

Goal to drive traffic, subscriptions

However, the texts are kept short because the strategy behind Buying Power is for it to drive people to Le Parisien’s paid online content.

“Everyone can follow and read this newsletter, even if you’re not a subscriber, but what we want to do at the end of the day is have more and more subscriptions,” Bonjean said.

However, the newsletters content can also be a bit of a frustration to readers, she said, because they are offered many articles that might be interesting for them, and while they get the basic, essential information they need to know “if you want to have more and really know our advice and read the whole story, then you click and have to pay for the whole article. That’s why the text is very, very short,” she said.

At the end of the newsletter, Bonjean said they always have a short farewell message intended to create another bond with the audience. There is also a message encouraging readers to subscribe to their other newsletters as well as a direct link button so readers can easily send in questions or comments.

Raising the profile of the content

In part, Buying Power is an outgrowth of a study they did that found people were less willing to pay to subscribe to Le Parisien because they didn’t see the difference between it and other news sources, Bonjean said.

The regular stories the paper produced on buying power weren’t hard news, so they were not ending up on the newspaper’s homepage.

“We have dedicated pages once a week about buying power, and we said, ‘OK, we have to go stronger on that subject because it’s something that our competitors don’t have, and it’s really in our commitment.'”

The newsletter now gives these stories a much greater exposure and helps provide readers with a reason to subscribe.

“It’s the promise to connect with the audience and help them on a daily basis with their questions about budget, and so it’s one leverage to motivate them to subscribe,” Bonjean said.

Two years after its launch, she said Buying Power has the highest opening rates of their stable of newsletters, and that the ratio between its audience and their subscription rate is quite good.

“I think it’s something that can really make a difference between Le Parisien and our competitors,” she added.

Once they have the articles, Bonjean and her team need only an hour or so to put the newsletter together, “so it’s very effective when you compare the time and the results,” she said.

Looking ahead, she said they are planning to keep the current strategy for Buying Power since it is working well for them, but that they are rethinking some of their other newsletters.

Different strategies for different newsletters

“Today, all of our newsletters are freely available, but if you want to read the stories you have to be a subscriber,” she said. “We are thinking about closing some of them and launching other niche newsletters because we’ve decided to have a new strategy on some topics.”

For example, they have a journalist who regularly writes about the topic of gender equality, so they are considering launching a newsletter about it. However, if they have specific journalists who are producing content for the newsletter, it would be reserved for subscribers, Bonjean said.

“We did the same thing with our science newsletter,” she said. “It’s one journalist who writes this newsletter. And he has something really cool, which is a space where he answers all the questions that people ask in response to his newsletter, but it’s a lot of work because you have to dedicate a lot of time because it has specific contents.”

WAN-IFRA Members can replay the webinar by clicking here. The Buying Power segment with Fanny Bonjean begins at 26:09.