How Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen are using JAMES Automation and Personalisation to step-up their newsletter strategy
Finnish Regional Publisher Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen joined the JAMES Launch Partner Programme in August 2021. As a regional publisher with tens of titles, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen were looking for a solution which could be easily adopted across different regional newsrooms. After receiving funding from the Facebook Accelerator Programme, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen chose to work with JAMES to launch their newsletters.
Why JAMES?
Email newsletters have not been a significant news product in Finland since the share of direct traffic is high. Therefore, after seeing the success on newsletters in other countries, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen identified email as an under utilised channel in their news distribution with subscribers. Whilst newsletters did exist in their newsrooms, these were often based off an RSS feed and emails were not performing well.
Johannes Niemeläinen
We wanted to spice up our emails so it was a perfect match to ask Twipe to introduce JAMES to us.
With a desire to spice up their emails, particularly for onboarding and retention, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen decided to look around the publishing world. After noticing the success of the JAMES Project at The Times of London, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen became inspired by JAMES and its’ personalisation power. After choosing to adopt JAMES, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen identified 3 key needs to be addressed:
- Automated and personalised newsletter production to have better email results
- Opening up an effective new digital channel to deliver news to customers.
- Reinvent onboarding and retention journeys
Impact of JAMES newsletters on subscribers
After launching a month early in October 2021, 10 titles are now live with JAMES. Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen now deliver 250,000 personalised newsletters to their subscribers each week. Early results across the different titles have been promising. As we have seen with other JAMES customers, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen have witnessed a growth in habitual reading.
Beyond habitual reading, the Finnish publisher have also benefited from a growth in engagement metrics. Click rates for JAMES Personalised Newsletters have increased by 4.5%. This figure is still below the average of other JAMES customers and is somewhere the collaboration is continuing to develop now that readers are in the habit of consuming email news.
Sending JAMES newsletters with the Twipe Email Sending Service
Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen chose to use the Twipe Emailing Sending Service which was co-developed as part of the programme. This was crucial for the success of the project since Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen own provider did not allow for personalisation. The Twipe team built this in July prior to the launch of the project in August 2021 so that the team could get straight into the details.
Inside the template, specially designed templates are available to be used across newsletters.
Johannes Niemeläinen
We are seeing newsletters as more important in the future as we build onboarding and retention processes.
Why Twipe?
One of the key features that stood out was the easy flexible nature of the Twipe teams. With regular stand-ups and data dive sessions, contact between publisher and provider has been crucial to the success of the project.
Twipe’s flexibility also impressed Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen and they were able to go live ahead of schedule. With a scheduled launch date of November 2021, Twipe and Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen were able to launch their first personalised newsletter in October 2021. Johannes had never been involved in a project where launch was ahead of schedule. This was down to the hard work, commitment and desire of both the Twipe and Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen teams.
Johannes Niemeläinen
I have not been involved in another project where we launched the actual product ahead of schedule.
