A good first impression is the beginning of a beautiful friendship

Magazines and weeklies are at the core of Egmont Publishing and their subscription business. They know that in all good stories, the opening has to hook you in or you’ll never stick around for the happy ending.

The same goes for a customer relationship. Already at the beginning of the customer lifecycle, you have to think about retention. That’s why the ability to create and execute data-driven and personalised welcome flows is crucial to Egmont Publishing.

And their personalisation effort clearly pays off. Churn was reduced by 22% already in the trial period with Agillic’s Omnichannel Marketing Automation Platform.

“We put a lot of effort into the welcome flow to ensure our subscribers stay with us. The ambition is to create an emotional bond. First of all, by providing quality content that can be trusted, but also by helping them to make the most of their subscription and by acting on the data they generate. We strive to build a solid relation through personalisation, relevance and adding value in every communication,” says Dorte Karlsson, Former Head of Data and Insights at Egmont Publishing

Data is writing the playbook

Egmont’s welcome flow is triggered by a series of events and factors and data is writing the playbook: Has the subscriber visited the website, and if yes, which sections?

Has a subscriber used the digital magazine subscription service? Shopped in the ”advantage shop” and so forth? The higher the engagement, the higher the probability that they continue the subscription.

In the positive cases, the communication encourages the subscriber to keep enjoying the benefits associated with the subscription. In case the subscriber is not using the opportunities, the communication nudges them into taking advantage of the benefits.

“We are data-driven and have a highly commercial approach. Everything we do must generate value. This applies for the business as well as for the customer — the two are intertwined and cannot be separated,” says Dorte.

Personalisation equals impact

With 27 titles and variables such as age, gender, location and other profile data as well as behavioural and transactional data, the level of personalisation executed from Agillic is high. And Egmont is continually testing new parameters for personalisation.

“We are, for example, testing content and tonality modulated according to age, search history and we are also testing send-time optimisation. And to wrap it up, personalisation, whether it is timing or content matters and shows in our results,” says Dorte Karlsson.

She continues, “Working with Agillic has enabled us to test the effect of personalisation and get verifiable results fast. You don’t have to be tech-savvy to do some fairly complicated stuff and accomplish a lot within a short period of time. The user interface works, and the platform offers useful features, such as the web tracking script, which we use with great success as well as the test capabilities.”

Priming leads based on the existing subscribers

Through a focused SEO effort, Egmont ensures traffic to their site. Having identified the characteristics of the most profitable subscribers before they became subscribers, Egmont applies this intelligence in the acquisition of new subscribers.

Egmont uses the data from the most loyal subscribers’ customer journeys to provide the right offer, at the right time to the potential new subscribers. This way, a new customer relationship and friendship is ready to unfold on the insights of the existing ones.

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