Ten years ago, newsletters were an established part of digital publishing. Then email became big business. By 2020, when Insider acquired a majority stake in the newsletter-led company Morning Brew for approximately $75m (£55.5m), it offered commercial proof the inbox could be far more than a distribution channel: it could be a destination, a habit and a valuable media product in its own right. Since then, the newsletter’s role inside media organisations has evolved again. In an era of fragmented audiences, volatile referral traffic and platforms that increasingly mediate the relationship between publishers and their audience, email offers something unusually powerful: a direct connection. As long as readers choose to keep opening. The underlying value proposition is simple: a newsletter is as worthwhile as its readers perceive it to be.
At National Geographic Traveller (UK), newsletters have undergone perhaps the most significant strategic update of any product in the digital portfolio I oversee. When I joined the brand four years ago, they primarily acted as content roundups – a medley of links and images used to remind readers about recent stories we’d published. Today, we treat newsletters as editorial products in their own right, with their own audience strategy, success metrics and even commissioning.
This change was partly a response to a larger shift across digital publishing. Social platforms have become gargantuan businesses whose commercial priorities don’t always align with those of publishers. Alterations to algorithms can overturn established audiences and undermine a channel’s reach overnight. A recent interview with LADbible’s CEO, for example, showed how a single opaque decision at Meta substantially affected the digital media and entertainment publisher’s reach and revenue. These changes in algorithms and user behaviour continually redefine how much of their own audiences media brands can actually reach.
Search is undergoing a similarly fundamental transformation. AI is reshaping how people discover information and consume content with zero-click search results reducing the need to visit websites producing content. Younger audiences especially are leading this shift, with 34% of gen Z reportedly using AI tools instead of traditional search engines.
In this media landscape, email remains one of the few channels where publishers can communicate directly with people who’ve chosen to hear from them. There’s no intermediary deciding what should be seen. It’s the closest publishers come to owning their audience rather than renting it.
The biggest mindset shift for us was moving away from seeing email as a way to distribute links, a tool for website traffic. Instead, we began asking a different question: what would make readers remain subscribers and engage with our newsletters even if they can find similar content on our website? Our KPI changed accordingly. Rather than focusing on website conversion, we put more emphasis on reach, active engagement and retention.
From there, our strategy developed around three priorities: improve engagement for better retention, diversify the portfolio to serve smaller but more invested audiences and drive growth through content that delivers immediate value.
Consistent novelty
Engagement depends on experimentation. Too often, newsletter teams confuse consistency with repetition, sticking to a successful formula long after it becomes predictable. But audiences, adapt quickly: once readers know what to expect, they have less reason to open.
Our approach has been to keep our editorial mission and standards consistent while evolving how we deliver them. The goal remains to inspire people to travel and explore, but each month, we test different visual treatments, image formats, new sections and subject line approaches. We experiment less frequently with variables such as send times, where changes can be harder to evaluate in isolation.
National Geographic’s visual heritage means photography is central to our storytelling. So, in the past year, we’ve redesigned our newsletters to contain larger imagery, introduced GIFs to illustrate photo-heavy stories and started spotlighting more photography that immerses readers rather than simply acting as thumbnails for stories.
We’ve also introduced more interactive sections highlighting archival photos and newsletter-only recommendations from our editors. One popular format is where we invite readers to answer a question based on a story. A photograph of a cutting-edge café interior, for instance, will be accompanied by a multiple-choice question challenging readers to guess in which city the cafe can be found, with the answer linking to our report on the evolution of the Parisian café scene.
The pub quiz edition was among our best-performing newsletters last year. Published at a time when pub closures and the pressures facing the hospitality industry were receiving significant public attention, it was designed to celebrate the British pub as a cultural institution. We built the newsletter around a series of questions connected to our existing pub features, with readers encouraged to explore the articles to find the answers.
Formats like these do more than increase immediate engagement. They can have a measurable effect on retention. In the year following our increased experimentation with interactive formats, the average unsubscribe rate per newsletter fell by 35%.
Growth is frequently discussed in terms of acquisition; basically, adding new people to a database. Yet, retaining existing subscribers is also growth and a better indication of whether your long-term audience is engaging.
It’s worth noting that experimentation has diminishing returns. We aim to balance creative formats with dependable curation of our strongest stories. Interactive quizzes perform extremely well when used sparingly, but use them every week, and they soon become friction rather than fun.
The results of this approach also suggest readers’ perception of value has changed. As we diversified our content and experimented with new formats, our best performing newsletters changed from those centred on giveaways and competitions to those driven by editorial content. When a deep dive on agritourism receives greater traction than the chance to win a holiday in the South of France, it’s a strong indication that the content itself has become the draw.
Growth through value delivery
In 2025, we also re-focused our acquisition strategy. Shifting away from broad messaging about the value of subscribing, we began to target readers’ needs at key moments. Targeted social ad campaigns led subscribers into custom journeys that delivered immediate value to their inbox through more focused and directly actionable content. For example, instead of posting inspirational messaging showing a skier, we promoted a skiing guide during the peak planning months for winter sports breaks. Subscribers received the relevant content package as soon as they signed up.
This approach established the value exchange at the beginning of the relationship with a new subscriber. Readers weren’t being asked to sign up for an abstract idea of future inspiration, but immediately received useful content. Subscribers acquired through these content-driven promotions show consistent open rates of more than 60%, as well as stronger long-term engagement and retention. This proved just how much that first interaction matters. When people associate your newsletter with clear and immediate value, they’re more likely to engage with future editions.
Creating communities
A holistic view of a brand’s ecosystem can also reveal specific interest groups that aren’t being served by a general newsletter. National Geographic is a brand strongly associated with visual imagery. At National Geographic Traveller (UK), that view is reinforced by an annual photography competition that draws in thousands of entries from photographers of all ability levels, as well as the event series ‘The Masterclasses’, where panels with award-winning and widely published photographers generate great interest.
Together with engagement in our online photography features, these products provided clear evidence of a highly invested photography community around the brand. So, we responded by creating a dedicated photography newsletter, with our in-house photo editors at the helm.
It’s since recorded the highest level of engagement any of our newsletters have ever seen (an open rate of more than 70%) and continues to grow consistently.
Most importantly, editorial ownership sits with the people who best understand the community. Our picture editors Ben Rowe and Aisha Nazar shape the newsletter’s content and voice. Editions have featured photographer interviews, kit recommendations, answers to reader questions and breakdowns of creative processes. Much of this material would perhaps struggle to find a home on our website or attract traffic through other means; however, it becomes relevant because it’s being delivered to a defined audience with a clear interest. This is the advantage of segmentation driven by editorial insight rather than data logic. The objective isn’t to divide a general audience into groups, but to identify distinct communities and build products they’d value.
Monetisation
The next step in our newsletter journey will be monetising exclusive newsletter content. Of course, paid newsletters aren’t new. For years, the Substack model has shown that readers will invest in distinctive voices and specialist content – the platform now supports more than five million paid subscriptions across some 50,000 active paid publications. But the opportunity is becoming increasingly significant for publishers as audiences meet generic, AI-generated journalism with suspicion, while original content rooted in expertise is becoming more distinctive, and therefore more valuable. For legacy brands such as National Geographic, the importance of putting authoritative human voices at the forefront of the product is essential to demonstrating the value of any digital offering.
That doesn’t mean simply placing an existing newsletter behind a paywall. Finding niche communities in our audience through segmentation and experimenting with the content is giving us significant insight into our readers’ interests, helping us to understand where they find the greatest value.
These insights then inform our long-term strategy of developing high-value products and converting engaged, niche audiences into paying communities. We hope to operate premium newsletters either as standalone products with their own revenue strategy or as part of wider bundles, supporting print and digital subscriptions and contributing to a diversified revenue plan.
The overall lesson we always come back to in our newsletter meetings is that email should be treated as a platform with its own content, acquisition and monetisation strategy and not simply as a promotional tool. Publishers can’t control how social platforms distribute content or how search engines integrate generative AI into their products. They can, however, invest in the relationships readers have deliberately chosen to establish with them, and the newsletter medium is the perfect opportunity for this. The principle we’ve found to work is, quite simply, this: growth begins with delivering enough value to make the next open feel worthwhile – and sometimes even worth paying for.
You can sign up to the National Geographic Traveller (UK) newsletter here.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
