About Penny Post

Penny Post offers a unique coverage of life in the Swindon, Wantage, Marlborough and West Berkshire area. You can follow Penny Post by subscribing to our FREE weekly e-newsletter which reaches over 4,000 people across the area. Or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or YouTube and keep visiting this website (which changes every day: typically 20 new posts are added each week).

We are:

informative, with local news that’s relevant to you;
supportive of local businesses, charities, campaigns and events;
collaborative with local contributors working for local people;
celebratory of good news; and
constructive in helping to suggest solutions for local issues.

We also publish monthly Penny Post Hungerford and Penny Post Lambourn Valley newsletters.

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 things but we always suggest what people can do to help make the situation better. 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 sewage 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.

How can I subscribe to the Penny Post newsletters?

To join over 4,000 other Penny Post subscribers, click on the ‘Subscribe’ link below to receive the Penny Post newsletter by email each week.

We don’t pass on details to third parties and you can opt out whenever you wish. The weekly e-newsletters contain local news, events, business recommendations, items wanted or offered, jobs, properties, seasonal recipes and much more. It also posted every week on Facebook and Twitter – all for free. To see a sample newsletter, click here.

Does it cost anything?

No, it is free to subscribe. However, if you have benefitted from Penny Post and would like to give something back please make a donation to this website via PayPal by clicking this button. This will help us continue to promote organisations and causes that have little or no budget.

What do other people think about Penny Post?

Please click here to see a selection of reactions from subscribers and advertisers.

What do the stats say?

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.

With all this in mind, see below for some figures about Penny Post’s performance.

• The weekly Penny Post e-newsletter is sent by email every Thursday to over 4,100 people (and growing) throughout the Penny Post area. It is also re-sent the following day to all recipients who have not opened the first one.

• The Penny Post Hungerford monthly e-newsletter is sent by email to about 1,300 people (and growing) in the town.

• The Penny Post Valley of the Racehorse monthly e-newsletter is sent by email to about 1,000 people (and growing) in the upper Lambourn Valley.

• The overall open rate is about 35% (according to Mailchimp, the industry standard is about 15%). 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 2,000 and 3,000 times and the two monthly newsletters between 750 and 1,250 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. (The real figure is higher still as Mailchimp doesn’t record campaign clicks which are made when a person clicks on a copy of the email which they’ve opened from its url.)

• The Penny Post website receives around 19,000 page views a month from about 8,500 different sessions (normally taken to represent the number of different visitors). The monthly average for 2018 was 15,200 page views a month with about 6,800 sessions; and for 2017 was 13,600 page views with about 5,700 sessions.

• Penny Post also has over 5,000 followers via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combined.

• Subscribers to the newsletters are not obliged to say where they live (though most 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 80% 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. It’s even harder to know where website visitors are based but we assume that much the same spread applies with that.

You might want to balance these cold figures with a more human reaction of what some of our subscribers and clients think of what we do for them: you can read that here.

How can I advertise in Penny Post?

Please click here for details of our commercial packages. If you need help not precisely cover by these options, get in touch (see below).

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.

Who is behind Penny Post?

Penny Post is compiled by long-time local residents Penny Locke and Brian Quinn from East Garston with contributions from subscribers across the area.

How can I contact you?

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.

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