Major publishing group reduced their Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) by more than 500%

As one of the world’s leading multimedia publishing groups, with activities across all publishing sectors, including newspapers, magazines, TV and new media, it is important to understand the minute details about customers, the content they consume and how they react to individual messages.

The challenge:

The publisher wanted to accelerate growth in new subscriptions for a range of publications and needed to achieve this with significantly lower customer acquisition costs.

The approach:

The publisher challenged Audiens to show clear growth in subscription conversion rates and measurable reductions in acquisition costs. To achieve this, two identical campaigns were run side-by-side, one with Audiens using recipes applied to advanced audience segments, and the other by the publisher using its own inhouse techniques. Audiens identified two key audiences

1. Active readers – people who read at least five articles per day from any of the publications available online
2. Active subscribers – customers already subscribed to at least one publication.

First, active subscribers were removed from the active readers list to remove wasted advertising spend. Then targeted advertising messages were delivered via Adform and AppNexus to the resulting audience of active readers who were not yet fully paid-up subscribers. This audience was offered a simple three-month subscription to publications they were already known to read regularly.

The results:

Key Stats:

+11% conversion rate

increase in subscribers

-500% CPA

reduction in cost per acquisition

Delivering relevant offers to potential subscribers who were already showing clear interest grew conversion rates by more than 11 times.

Using this much more targeted approach to convert regular readers into subscribers reduced the publisher’s cost per acquisition by more than 500%.

Next steps:

The publisher is planning to apply these principles to more publications and add more detailed audience segments to keep improving the relevance of marketing communications. Campaign timings and external influences, such as news and sports events, will also be added to drive subscription uptake.

“Media publishing success is based on delivering exciting, relevant content that people really engage with. Understanding our readers on a deeper level and delivering more targeted, personal communications has dramatically increased regular engagement, and driven growth in new subscriptions.”