Rethinking the “Newsletter” — A year in the data, and a shift in perspective
Reflections from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine website redevelopment project
We’re deep into our website redevelopment project — rethinking not just how the site looks and works, but how it serves people. How it communicates. How it earns attention and trust.
One of the areas we’ve been revisiting is how we handle email updates — specifically, those familiar “newsletter” messages we send to prospective students and researchers.
And after more than a year of looking closely at the data — open rates, user journeys, behaviours before and after emails are sent — something interesting has started to emerge.
It’s not that newsletters don’t work.
It’s that the word newsletter may have been leading us down the wrong path.
A year of data, and a pattern emerges
For months, we assumed the problem was content or timing. That emails weren’t always landing because of subject lines, or too much text, or lack of imagery.
But when you step back and look across dozens of email campaigns, a broader truth becomes clearer: people aren’t waiting for news.
They’re not looking for monthly round-ups. They’re not tuning in for announcements.
What gets opened, read and clicked are the emails that offer something useful. Not just informative — insightful. Not just about us — but relevant to them.
It’s not news people want. It’s perspective.
The newsletter we’ve outgrown
Calling it a newsletter sets a certain expectation: a broadcast, a round-up, a list of things that happened. Which works well for institutional updates, but less so when the goal is engagement, action, or decision-making.
Especially for prospective students — whose inboxes are already full of university comms — a “newsletter” feels like something they’ll read later. If at all.
The emails that performed best over the last 12 months didn’t follow that pattern.
They:
- Opened with a clear, relevant insight
- Spoke directly to the reader’s current challenge or question
- Offered value — not just updates
- Sounded like a person, not a platform
In short, they didn’t feel like newsletters at all.
So… Should we stop using the word?
Maybe not.
One of the insights we’ve come to through this project is that terminology isn’t the problem. It’s the expectations we attach to it.
If we can redefine what a newsletter is — if we treat it as a space to deliver insights, not just news — then perhaps it still has a role. Not as a content container, but as a format that earns attention by being useful, human, and well-timed.
We can’t expect people to engage with content just because we’ve published it. That was the old model. The new model is about relevance. Recipients should feel we’re speaking to them, not at them.
And sometimes, all it takes is shifting the tone of a subject line. Or writing the way we’d speak. Or saying, “Here’s something we’ve learned — and we thought you might find it helpful.”
That’s when people respond. That’s when email starts working with the website, not just sitting alongside it.
Where we go from here
As we build out the new site, email isn’t a bolt-on — it’s a key part of the user journey. Whether it’s an update for prospective students, a research digest for partners, the aim is the same:
To make every message feel intentional, relevant, and easy to act on.
If we can do that — whether we call it a newsletter or something else entirely — then we’re on the right track.
Because ultimately, this isn’t about terminology.
It’s about trust.
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