April 5, 2018

Future

Publishing Sees Increased Revenue From Using Conditional Content To Drive Personalised Content

Future is an international publishing group and leading digital business. Set up in 1985 with a single magazine, it has grown to a portfolio of over 200 print titles, apps, websites, and events.

The Challenge

Future Publishing’s team wanted to enhance the performance of the cross-sell and up-sell campaigns by showing customers content that was relevant to them based on their current or lapsed magazine subscriptions. To incorporate this approach into their long-term strategy, the solution needed to be both effective and time-efficient.

Partnering with Adestra to fulfil the following objectives, Future wanted to:

  • Deliver relevant and personalised content to subscribers
  • Improve engagement and conversions
  • Test the effectiveness of their personalisation tactics.

The Strategy

Future used the personalisation and conditional content functionalities in the Adestra Email Editor, an interface which allows marketers to create hyper-relevant messaging, without the need to create multiple campaigns or code laborious HTML templates.

They wanted to test the effectiveness of these tactics as a proof of concept prior to rolling them out more widely as part of their email strategy.

The team decided to run a split test, in which conditional content was tested against a control. The magazine binder up-sell campaign was sent to active and lapsed subscribers as well as item purchasers. In variant A, the image showed a binder design matching their current subscription or previous purchase. In variant B (the control), a range of binder designs was shown.

 

 

Future also used conditional content in cross-sell campaigns for its design and photography titles. The objective of these campaigns is to encourage customers to subscribe to other titles in their area of interest. For active subscribers, the email was personalised with their name and current subscription and other complementary titles were shown. These titles were shown using conditional content rules to drive the content hierarchy (showing the next priority product based on their existing subscription).

 

Future Publishing - Cross-sell email campaign

Future Cross-sell email campaign text

 

Future also used conditional content in a campaign to get new subscribers to register for the online portal TeamRock+. Conditional content drives a dynamic banner matching their current subscription, and a voucher code functionality delivers a unique voucher code giving subscribers access to TeamRock+.

 

 

The Results

Conditional content is a powerful tool to drive relevant and personalised content, improve the customer experience, and ultimately improve email ROI:

  • For the binder upsell campaign (A/B split test), the conditional content variant delivered twice as much revenue compared to the non-conditional content variant.
  • The design cross-sell campaign achieved a healthy 34 per cent open rate and a 9.9 per cent conversion rate. The photography cross-sell campaign achieved a 4.8 per cent conversion rate. The Future team was pleased with the uplift on similar campaigns sent previously.
  • The TeamRock+ email saw an impressive 73 per cent open rate and 39 per cent CTOR, plus an 11.3 per cent redemption rate on the unique code.