Saturday Telegraph tempts women with a Sunday read

The Saturday edition of the Telegraph is likely to carry regular copies of Sunday Telegraph women’s magazine Stella to drive circulation of the Sunday title.

The sampling exercise – aimed at the 250,000 people in London and the South-east who read the Telegraph on Saturdays but not Sundays – was tried out last weekend with a “free trial issue”.

The exercise coincided with the weekend that former Times business editor Patience Wheatcroft took over the editorship of the Sunday Telegraph after Sarah Sands was removed from the role last month.

Wheatcroft immediately reversed some of the changes her predecessor made, including reverting to a black gothic masthead after Sands’ softer blue version. But Stella – a supplement launched by Sands – is seen by insiders as a potent weapon with which to increase the appeal of the Sunday Telegraph to 30-year-old women readers.

Marketing director Katie Vanneck says: “Lots of our Saturday readers defect the following day and read the Sunday Times, so we’ll track how effective this is and may continue to do it.”

One press director says: “There is a huge amount of readership that sees one title on a Saturday and a title from a different group on a Sunday. Newspaper owners will see any targeted sampling exercise that tempts these readers to stay loyal and read their newspapers over an entire weekend as an easy win. Many groups don’t use their seven-day operation to cross-promote in this way.”