Stats and demographics

E-newsletters – subscribers

• The weekly Penny Post – sent every Thursday (and re-sent to non-openers on Saturday morning) to about 4,500 subscribers throughout the Penny Post area.
• Penny Post Hungerford – sent on the Tuesday after the first working Monday of the month to about 1,600 subscribers in the town.
• Penny Post Valley of the Racehorse – sent on the Saturday after Penny Post Hungerford to about 1,050 subscribers in the upper Lambourn Valley.

E-newsletters – open and click rates

• The overall open rate is about 39%. In addition, newsletters are opened more than once, forwarded to others or are viewed as a webpage. In total, the weekly newsletters are generally opened between 3,500 and 4,000 times and the two monthly newsletters between 750 and 1,500 times.
• The clicks per unique opens rate varies from about 35% to 45% for the weekly newsletters and from about 45% to 55% for the monthly ones. The actual number of clicks is normally between two and three times the clicks per open rate, ie on average the people who do click visit two or three separate links.

Website

The approximate page views and number of different sessions (generally taken to mean the number of visitors) on the Penny Post website per month are as follows:
• 2020: 21,500 page views, 11,500 sessions
• 2019: 18,800 page views, 8,300 sessions
• 2018: 15,200 page view, 6,800 sessions
• 2017: 13,600 page views, 5,700 sessions
• 2016: 10,000 page views, 4,000 sessions

Social media

• Penny Post has over 7,500 followers via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram combined. Engagement with these platforms takes place pretty much every day.

Demographics

• Subscribers to the newsletters are not obliged to say where they live (though many do) so we’re unable to be certain about the overall geographic spread. In any event, someone may have an interest in more than one area, for example if they live in Marlborough and work in Newbury. Our best estimate is that about 75% of our subscribers live and/or work in West Berkshire or have a close association with it; and that most of the rest are in the arc from Marlborough up to Wantage.

Contributing and re-using

How can I contribute to Penny Post?

Subscribers can simply email Penny at penny@pennypost.org.uk  or reply to any newsletter to contribute requests, recommendations, local events, items wanted/offered, jobs, properties, seasonal recipes etc.

Can I use any of the articles or posts on Penny Post in my own publication or website?

You are welcome to provide a link to any post on our site but Penny Post cannot guarantee that the post will not be disabled or the url changed so it would be wiser to check with us first. You may also quote extracts of a reasonable length providing you credit Penny Post as the source for this. You may not reproduce in whole or in part anything published on this website without the prior written permission of Penny Post.

The Penny Post ethos

Whereas traditional media often boosts sales through broadcasting bad or sensational news, we are committed to sharing constructive local news and opinions and to offering affordable advertising, flexible and effective promotional support for local businesses.

That’s not to say that we are in denial about bad news but where possible we suggest what people can do to help make the situation better. Nor does it mean that we accept good-news stories at face value but will do our best to dig a bit deeper and suggest praise or blame where it appears to be due. We are not affiliated to any political party. We’re happy to express our opinions, happy to receive comments and happy to admit if we’ve got something wrong. We’ve been involved in a number of local campaigns on issues ranging from pub closures to planning appeals, from urgent charity appeals to public meetings and from dubious sewerage works to threatened libraries and post offices.

We are reassured by the popularity of Penny Post that this is what people really want. Click here to find out what some of our readers and clients think of us.

Covid-19: Penny Post has since early March 2020 been concentrating on providing information about volunteer groups, local businesses offering takeaway and delivery services, government and council initiatives, sources of advice for business, online and distance-learning courses and CV-19-related articles. Many of these organisations are commercial ones struggling to re-invent themselves while others are voluntary groups. None of those featured in these sections are at this stage being charged. We shall continue to keep these updated, and add new posts as necessary, for as long as the crisis lasts.

Contact

Penny Post is compiled by long-time local residents Penny Locke and Brian Quinn from East Garston with contributions from subscribers across the area. To discover more about them, listen to this Knock Knock with Suzie Cairns interview with Penny.

To get in touch, email penny@pennypost.org.uk or brian@pennypost.org.uk. If you’d rather call, you can reach Penny on 07768 981 658 or Brian on 01488 648 110.

A note on the web stats

Any online stats can tell a variety of stories. Different sources (for example Google Analytics and a website’s own records) often disagree but not always in a consistent way. The email programme we use, Mailchimp, provides detailed stats but there are often anomalies, again in either direction, from what common sense or other information suggests. If the business of  online stats was not such a dark art then everyone would understand it and there would not be so many people trying to sell their services as expert interpreters and improvers.