Winner: "Rejecting serial offenders for the greater good – more profit, better renewal rates and ultimately more loyal subscribers!", Immediate Media
Every year Immediate has run a January sale campaign, offering the best discounts to drive volume. But in 2019, rather than focus on driving volume, it wanted to acquire good-quality, new subscribers by increasing activity through channels with unknown audiences, and reduce churn.
The strategy was twofold – communicating with existing customers and acquiring new subscribers. For the former it used carrier sheets, page ads and email to encourage them to try a new title. All this activity promoted the same message: "Try something new for 2019."
For new subscribers, Immediate used data analysis from previous campaigns and identified online channels such as Facebook, YouTube and PPC as the best ways to target them.
Through testing videos on YouTube and targeting a wider audience on Facebook, Immediate was able to focus on "colder" audiences and saw some positive results. YouTube was used as a brand awareness element of the campaign as opposed to direct response. Through PPC, it used limited-time promotional messaging in the shopping feed and promotion extensions.
To stop "serial trialists", it implemented a new strategy where it rejected anyone who had already taken out a subscription to the same magazine in the past 12 months or anyone who had taken out three or more trials across the publisher’s portfolio in the past three years without renewing any of them.
The results showed Immediate acquired 17,794 subscriptions in total, of which 5,231 were brand-new customers with whom it did not have a relationship, and by cracking down on serial trialists, first-time renewal rates from people stepping up from the trial offer to a higher-priced, six-monthly direct debit offer improved significantly.
Highly commended
"Beano Brain", Beano Studio
Beano Brain is designed to enable Beano Studios to be the best at understanding kids in real time, both to drive continuous improvement of Beano’s own content and products but also so that third parties can improve their own offerings by leveraging its power. Beano Brain is a powerful combination of qualitative and quantitative research, anonymised first-party data and user-testing feedback. Through weekly access to a panel of kids (the Trendspotters) via Facetime-conducted interviews, school visits, website analytics and online polls, this data and insight is fed back into the business. Beano Brain has also acted as the engine room for a year of 300% year-on-year revenue growth for Beano’s commercial business.
Shortlisted
"An urgent mission: project body love", Hearst UK