Turning an underused channel into a key engagement tool
In Finland, where direct traffic is the dominant way readers access news, email newsletters have traditionally been an underutilized tool for audience engagement. Finnish regional publisher Keskisuomalainen, managing over 60 regional and local newspapers, saw an opportunity to change this by making newsletters a core part of their onboarding and retention strategy. However, the state of their newsletters—often basic and RSS feed-based—was not delivering results, and high churn rates in digital subscriptions signaled a need for a fresh approach.
Inspired by the success of the JAMES Project at The Times of London, Keskisuomalainen sought to transform its newsletter strategy. The ultimate goal was to create automated, personalized newsletters that would deliver relevant content, foster habitual reading, and drive long-term retention.
Juho Hämäläinen
All and especially our smaller newsrooms have benefited greatly from automated newsletters, as our reporters can now concentrate on their core work. Thanks to the personalisation algorithm, we can be confident every day that our subscribers receive information about stories that are highly relevant to them.
Implementing personalization at scale with Twipe’s personalized newsletter technology
In August 2021, Keskisuomalainen joined the JAMES Launch Partner Program. With support from the Meta Journalism Project, they collaborated with Twipe to implement JAMES, Twipe’s AI-driven personalization engine, as the core of their new newsletter strategy. The team knew that automation was essential, as many of their newsrooms only comprised two to three people, making manual content personalization unfeasible.
Keskisuomalainen identified three main objectives:
- Automate and personalize newsletter production to boost email performance and reduce workload.
- Open an effective new digital channel to deliver news tailored to individual subscriber interests.
- Redesign onboarding and retention journeys to build stronger reader loyalty.
To achieve these goals, Twipe developed a customized Email Sending Service that allowed for deep personalization, addressing a key limitation of Keskisuomalainen’s existing provider. Additionally, custom templates designed by Twipe made it easy to scale personalized newsletters across titles, ensuring consistency and efficiency.
Personalized newsletters drive subscriber engagement and retention
The project was initially set to launch in November 2021, and it went live ahead of schedule. As of 2024, the publisher has scaled JAMES-powered newsletters to nineteen titles, delivering over 450,000 personalized newsletters weekly.
The impact of Twipe’s personalized newsletters was immediate and measurable. Key outcomes include:
- A 5% increase in open rate and a 4.5% increase in click rate for personalized emails compared to editorially produced newsletters.
- 40-50% of onboarded readers converted to long-term subscribers after a 3-month trial, with some regions surpassing 50%.
- 6,500 readers activated (moving from no interaction in the past 30 days to at least one interaction) and 4,700 habitual readers created (engaging 10 or more days in the past 30 days).
- Reduced churn rates among readers exposed to JAMES emails, with retention trends projected to remain positive.
This impressive performance contributed to Keskisuomalainen’s recognition at the INMA Global Media Awards, where they won the ‘Best Initiative to Retain Subscribers’ award in 2023.
