Penrith Town Council have agreed to renew a £5200 annual subscription to send email newsletters to less than 2000 subscribers using an email marketing platform the council first started using in 2023 after paying over £7,560 in its first year for the system the town council will now pay a further £5200 for a 12month subscription for the service.
The council has slowly gained subscribers to its newsletter but still has less than 2000 unique subscribers with an average total open rate for the town council email newsletters of 64.5% and average click rates of just 15%.
Ahead of the annual renewal the council said a review of other email distribution platforms had been considered alongside the current govDelivery system used by the council including Campaigner and Campaign Monitor.
But councillors were recommended to approve the Council renew its contract with Granicus for the govDelivery service for April 2025 – April 2026 as the Council has an established, engaged subscriber-base with GovDelivery and concerns of council officers that if an alternative email distribution platform was chosen, the consent of each individual subscriber would be needed to transfer their email contacts onto an alternative system – likely resulting in the loss of hundreds of subscribers.
Alongside the councils £5200 annual subscription for emails, the town council also spends an average of £4000 on paid adverts across print publications and social media and this year the council is also planning to spend £5000 on development of a new council website to replace the council’s current site through a closed invitation to tender process inviting three companies based in Bedfordshire, Basingstoke and Huddersfield to tender for the development of the councils new website.
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