When the world’s biggest superstar, Taylor Swift, announced her tour dates in Germany, the team at Rheinische Post saw an opportunity to connect with a passionate, younger audience. The result was “Waiting for Taylor,” a 10-week newsletter dedicated to Swift’s fans. The German publisher’s fan-centric experiment during its second round in TSE went on to inspire other audience engagement initiatives, redefining how a local newsroom can connect with readers.
Rheinische Post Media Group is a large regional media group, which includes four newspapers in the west of Germany. Other activities include interests in radio stations, classified advertising, printing services, call centres, transport and logistics. The group’s flagship newspaper, the Rheinische Post was established in 1946. It covers a region that includes four large cities including Düsseldorf. RP has 290 journalists and prints 19 local editions. It has the largest circulation in the Rhineland, with 260,000 subscribers, including 75,000 digital subscribers. Of these, 35,000 subscribe to the e-paper version and about 40,000 to its digital web content, RP+. Overall, the 25-year-old website receives 6.7 million unique users per month.
By Martina Stöcker, Head of News Management
The biggest superstar in the world is going on tour and is starting her German concerts in our region of all places: Taylor Swift. Not only is she an idol and a political influencer, but thanks to her fans, she also literally shakes the earth at her performances. Tickets for the three concerts in July were snapped up in a flash.
It was obvious that there would be a lot to say about Taylor Swift and her concerts. So the idea of “Waiting for Taylor” was born, a free newsletter that was launched 10 weeks before the first concert, intending to provide information for Swifties and explain the Taylor Swift phenomenon to everyone else.
Philipp Holstein, Editor of the Culture team, was responsible for the content, with three young journalists and big Swift fans at his side. We started reporting well before the first newsletter at the beginning of May in order to cover the topic early on and build up a stock of articles. We also built up a reserve of accompanying picture galleries and information sections in order to enrich and refine our reporting with suitable content.
From ‘Waiting for Taylor’ to ‘Here & Wow’
For the newsletter distribution list, we selected from our newsletter subscribers those who had interacted a lot with cultural and pop music content.
We started with a base of 3,300 subscribers and ended up with about 5,000 subscribers. We advertised “Waiting for Taylor” on Instagram, Facebook and in the newspaper, and had banner ads on our homepage and other sites. The newsletter was automatically mentioned in all sub-editorials such as Music, Streaming, Television and Panorama/People. Our advertising department found a sponsor for the newsletter. A mini-publishing team from several publishing departments met regularly to drive the project forward.
In the 10 weeks and the few days following the three concerts in Gelsenkirchen, we produced well over 100 articles and picture galleries. We deliberately opted for a large funnel and a personalised approach. The newsletter had a familiar touch: it was not a link sling, but rather provided insights, explanations and personal recommendations. Readers were invited to create their personal Swift lists on Spotify and send them to us. The metered paywall was switched off for all Taylor articles, except for the concert review from the first evening, which was placed behind the paywall.
Overall, we achieved an open rate of between 21 and 25 percent among our newsletter recipients. We were very satisfied with this, as it performed better than many other newsletters from our editorial team. With Swift content, we reached 2,450,000 page impressions and six conversions. The share of direct traffic was very high (71.4 percent), and our hard and early work paid off – we became the number 1 medium for these concerts in the region.
Sixty percent of readers were users who interact with our homepage less than five times a month, which means we created a lot of new contacts for our brand.
However, we were surprised by one effect we hadn’t expected. Ten days before the first concert, we switched from weekly to daily mode as planned – and we expected another push for our subscriber numbers. But the opposite was the case: we lost 30 to 40 newsletter subscribers per day. So we learned that more and more is not necessarily what even hardcore fans want.
Very quickly – already during the Taylor newsletter – we realised we didn’t want to give up on this audience (female, younger, interested in music and cultural content) and so we developed a follow-up newsletter.
“Here & Wow” was already announced to the Swift readers, and when the Taylor train moved on, the new newsletter was launched.
Surprisingly, and to our great delight, almost all subscribers remained loyal. So far, we have had 50 cancellations and 80 new followers. The new service is aimed at younger women every fortnight. Topics include music, streaming, Booktok, reports on celebrities, but also topics from politics, society or health with a female perspective. We have changed the concept of the newsletter: We are integrating more links and reading recommendations, and of course the newsletter now also includes articles behind the paywall or metered paywall. With a slightly larger team, we now want to increase reach and interaction.
‘It’s not about us, it’s about you!’
The “Waiting for Taylor” newsletter was one of the projects we tackled with TSE and it focused on a specific audience. This year, we generally focused on new target groups and a change of perspective in our newsroom.
With the slogan ‘It’s not about us, it’s about you!’, we wanted to make it clear that we are focussing on the needs of our users. The main focus was on our key target group aged between 30 and 50, well-educated, high-earners, some with families, interested in the finer things in life and social advancement.
This was Rheinische Post’s second participation in TSE, after our first round in 2022. At that time, we worked with pop-up audiences and focused specifically on two audiences, amateur runners and expectant mothers. This time, the aim was to repeat the past success and create an offer for our new main target group that we want to expand and consolidate sustainably during the coming years.
To do this, we have started to reorganise our newsroom and focus on the needs of this group. We have selected four of eight regional teams and three of seven supra-regional teams as pilot teams. The Kleve region was to focus on Dutch topics from the perspective of German holidaymakers, Krefeld and Neuss on young families, and Düsseldorf focused primarily on foodies. The Economy and Report departments concentrated on service (property, money, leisure), and Culture experimented with new, more modern formats and topics for this younger group.
During the year, we were able to increase the value of an individual article in the regional departments by 36 percent, meaning that each individual article found more readers. In the national teams, this figure was 15 percent. We were also able to increase our reach by 33 and 15 percent respectively. In terms of conversions, we were not able to record any effects nationally, but regionally at least Kleve increased by 10 percent.
In addition, all teams were asked to bring audience topics to our weekly meeting, present them and then implement them. Each week, the news management team selected best practice examples and presented them at the beginning of the conference. This helped to better understand the topics we wanted to see by presenting articles as role models for everyone and also giving tips on how we could improve. The news management team qualified the topics, made some adjustments and monitored the success. The goal was to learn more about user habits and to check whether we were meeting the readers’ interests.
As all teams took part in this meeting, the entire editorial team at Rheinische Post had to get to grips with audience-focused work. A clear effect can already be seen in the approach to topics. But 2024 was only the start. In 2025, we will continue to restructure the newsroom with the techniques and many inspiring ideas from the TSE programme.