Surrey Live - Bake On Bake Off

Bake On Bake Off is one of Reach’s Obsession newsletters which brings people with similar interests together and creates communities around them through newsletters. The newsletter is written by journalist Laura Nightingale whose love for baking and The Great British Bake Off shines through as she includes baking tips, news about the series and quick and easy recipes, many of which are inspired by the show. Laura is at the heart of the newsletter, a friendly face readers can relate to and share their baking successes and failures with. She often appears in the videos, signs off the newsletter personally and carries the brand across to her Instagram account where she has 52k followers to whom she cross- promotes the newsletter and her content. Bake On Bake Off was launched to capitalise on our audience’s interest in The Great British Bake Off by providing readers with a way of finding this content from our sites in one place. But it has evolved into more than just a newsletter focused on a TV series, it’s a community of like-minded people who come together twice a week all year round, to share their love of baking and their thoughts and pictures of their baking creations through Your Bakes. The fully authored newsletter was launched in March 2021 and has sent more than 300 issues. During that time Bake On Bake Off has evolved in numerous ways, while building a community of followers, not only via newsletter subscribers but followers on Instagram and snapchat. The newsletter is sent twice a week and has 30,000 active subscribers. We also send ‘breaking’ newsletters when there are key updates, eg. when Alison Hammond was confirmed as the new co-host of The Great British Bake Off. The newsletter consistently has a high open rate with an average in October of 54%. This is a very high open rate compared to Reach newsletters and to newsletters/marketing emails generally. It shows readers are clearly very engaged with Bake On Bake Off and come back regularly. To ensure we evolved in the right way we launched a survey to find out what our subscribers wanted from the newsletter in terms of content and frequency. Subscribers were most interested in our easy to follow recipes and these results helped shape the future of Bake On Bake Off, to keep readers engaged throughout the year. Laura now shares links to videos she has made to help people recreate these recipes at home. The most popular examples include her ‘bake in a mug’ recipes such as a two-minute carrot cake recipe and larger creations like a lemon celebration cake. We have also experimented with the design of the newsletter to see if this improved the customer experience by using an authored template rather than a combined manual RSS which led to a permanent change in March 2022. The result is the newsletter is divided into easy to follow sections with clear calls to action for customers to continue reading if they want to.