Success Story

Future Publishing sees increased revenue from using conditional content to drive personalized content

Future wanted to show customers content that was relevant to them based on their magazine subscriptions.

Brand

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.

Objectives:

  • Deliver relevant and personalized content to subscribers
  • Improve engagement and conversions
  • Test the effectiveness of their personalization tactics

The Challenge

Future Publishing’s team wanted to enhance the performance of their 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.

The Solution

Future used personalization and conditional content functionality 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 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.

 

The Future team have also used conditional content in cross-sell campaigns for their 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 personalized 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).

 

They also used conditional content in a campaign to get new subscribers to register for their online portal TeamRock+. Conditional content is used to drive a dynamic banner matching their current subscription. Voucher codes functionality is used to deliver a unique voucher code giving subscribers access to TeamRock+.

 

Results

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% open rate and a 9.9% conversion rate. The photography cross-sell campaign achieved a 4.8% conversion rate. The Future team were pleased with the uplift on similar campaigns sent previously.

The TeamRock+ email saw an impressive 73% open rate and 39% CTOR, plus an 11.3% redemption rate on the unique code.

These results indicate that conditional content is a powerful tool to drive relevant and personalized content, improve the customer experience and ultimately improve email ROI.

 

What’s next?

The Future team are very happy with the results of their conditional content testing and will be introducing conditional content elements across their campaigns for all brands.

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