A publisher in the Netherlands sent a newsletter that hit a 98% unique open rate
This article was originally published on Not a Newsletter: A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails.
I didn’t think it was possible for a newsletter — at least one with any sort of scale — to have a unique open rate above 65%. Getting 1 in 3 subscribers to open a newsletter would be an achievement for most news organizations. Getting 2 in 3 to open would be a Herculean feat.
Then I heard about a publisher in the Netherlands that sent a newsletter that hit a 98% unique open rate. That’s not a typo: Ninety-eight percent, for an email sent to almost 10,000 subscribers!
So I had to learn a little more.
The publisher is NOS, the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation. They’re a public broadcaster with a TV, radio, and digital presence, and they’re the biggest news organization in the Netherlands. The way Lambert Teuwissen, an editor at NOS, explained it, the newsroom first launched newsletters a decade ago, but without much success.
“We started doing newsletters, and then it tapered off,” he said. “Nobody was really interested in them anymore. They were kind of formulaic. There wasn’t any soul to it.”
But things changed in recent years. NOS moved their newsletters over to Revue, and started launching products around specific issues: a weekly newsletter about the Trump administration, and then a newsletter about policy in Brussels. These were destination products built with a specific audience in mind, and NOS saw positive results right away.
“It turned out that those kinds of niche groups were really interested in newsletters,” Teuwissen said. “They had a dedicated reader base. People wanted to talk back with us, people wanted to ask us questions.”
Earlier this year, NOS started planning out an ambitious project: “75 jaar bevrijding,” or “75 years of liberation,” to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Europe during World War II. NOS decided to launch a site that would follow the liberation in real time, presenting what happened 75 years ago on a particular date as though it were happening today.
The project would run from September 2019 through August 2020, and Teuwissen said the team knew that it needed to find a way to keep readers interested over the span of the project. “That’s where the newsletter came in,” he said.
Teuwissen’s team decided to launch a pop-up newsletter to run the length of the project — a weekly email that would include the best stories of the week and bonus content. While “75 jaar bevrijding” would focus on the “present day” news, the newsletter would give NOS the chance to share stories of what happened both during and after the war.
NOS started promoting the newsletter in their other email products and on the “75 jaar bevrijding” site. On launch day, they’d collected nearly 10,000 subscribers for the email, and that first email had a 98% unique open rate. They’d identified an incredibly loyal and engaged audience, and delivered a product just for them. The newsletter, from day 1, was a hit.
Since launch, their email list has continued to grow. Ten issues in, the newsletter now has about 25,000 subscribers, and open rates continue to stay strong: Above 70% for each send, which is still exceptionally high for a major news organization like NOS.
But the success of this newsletter goes beyond open rate. Of the seven NOS newsletters, the liberation newsletter is one of the most-clicked week after week, and subscribers are unusually engaged with the email. Early on, Teuwissen started asking subscribers questions, and those readers began emailing back with ideas for stories to cover.
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “It keeps us sharp, because each week, we get these replies, and each week, we have to go through our replies and see what we can do with these stories that readers are sending us.”
Newsletter readers have also been helpful in crowdsourcing content for the newsletter. In one edition, Teuwissen asked readers if they could help identify the location of an image taken from a December 1944 film produced by the Canadian army, in which Canadian troops liberating a Dutch town are seen riding alongside an officer dressed as Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Santa Claus.
Within days, readers had identified the windmill in the background of the photo, and Teuwissen shared the news with subscribers in the very next issue.
The project has been so successful that Teuwissen is starting to think about expanding it to new audiences. NOS is considering launching another version of the newsletter, in English, to bring these stories to even more readers, including Dutch émigrés who want to share it with their families, and readers in countries that helped liberate the Netherlands. (UPDATE, Nov. 18: They’ve launched the English edition! You can sign up here.) They’re also thinking about other opportunities to crowdsource content — including from unexpected sources.
Some readers have started sending NOS the diaries kept by their parents or grandparents, with hopes that NOS will be able to tell stories that have never before been told about the war. The team is even hiring additional staff to sift through all this unpublished material.
“One might just contain one of those jewels, one of those pearls, of a story that we want to publish,” Teuwissen said.
Three Lessons from NOS’s 75 Years of Liberation Newsletter
1.) Use a pop-up product as a way to start testing — It can be intimidating to launch a daily or a weekly newsletter product. But launching a pop-up product gives you the chance to send a newsletter for a fixed period of time — a few days or a few months — around a specific event, and test out different formats or ideas. Based on what you learn, you can always launch new newsletters.
2.) Ask your readers questions — Readers can be valuable sources of insight, and sharing their stories can build a community around a newsletter. It also allows you to reply directly to readers and establish a relationship with individual subscribers. Teuwissen said that on social media, discussion can often be uncivil, but over email, he’s seen readers be far more polite and engaged. “This starts an adult conversation about the subjects that you’re writing about,” he said.
One more reason to ask readers to engage with you: Getting readers to reply to your newsletter can actually improve your inbox placement in Gmail and other email services.
3.) Don’t be afraid to take a leap — When you launch a newsletter, you might not be sure if it will actually work. Sometimes, you’re making an educated guess that a newsletter might be useful for your audience — and that’s OK! When I asked Teuwissen what his expectations were in advance of the project, he admitted, “We had no idea. It is something unique. We had never done something like this before.” But even when you try something brand new, you should still set goals in advance (list size, open rates, traffic to your site, etc.), and use those as benchmarks for success.
Do you have a newsletter, too?
Check out our weekly update for newsletter editors and audience managers The week in newsletters. Or read more experiences and best practices in our newsletter experts blog post series.
