Marketing costs continue to climb. And, with so many messages in front of customers, it is harder than ever to gain attention and reach them when it matters.

According to a recent study by Optimove, “Almost eight in 10 consumers (79%) unsubscribed from at least one retail brand in the past 90 days saying they were bombarded by marketing messages.” While publishers are not retail brands, the statistic still holds true, as the more e-mails we send, the more tired a consumer gets of seeing them.

Another great quote from this piece is from Pini Yakuel, CEO of Optimove: “Fewer right messages at the right time will probably deliver equal or better results. If brands get this right, they can spend less on marketing and connect with consumers rather than burn them out. It is an opportunity to optimise marketing budgets and create customer loyalty for life.”

About seven years ago, I wrote a post for INMA called “Fail quickly, cheaply, successfully.” In the years since, much has changed to that approach, and it is even more important in today’s environment.

How do we test but not overwhelm consumers? 

We need to take a pragmatic approach to how we test, and let data determine how we move forward. We have a few ways we are testing as our team works to better engage subscribers.

Just a few weeks ago, we launched a trending content feed e-mail. Or, as we like to call it, the ICYMI e-mail. This e-mail series is working to re-engage our two lowest engaged cohorts of subscribers: those we call at-risk and zombies.

This is a four-week series we are first testing in just seven of our markets. We are three weeks into this test and seeing amazing results with open rates close to our normal engagement e-mail sends and click-through rates slightly lower than our baseline.

At first glance, you may wonder why we are pleased with results that are not as good as our normal sends. The reason is that, previously, these subscribers received newsletters and many other e-mails they were not engaged in. Driving them back to our Web sites with this series is a huge win.

If the campaign continues to perform well, we will expand to include more markets and possibly even automate the sends. We are also planning to use a new feed that will remove stories a subscriber may have read, making this even more of an ICYMI series.

Testing in social media

In the fall of 2022, we began testing a new idea using Meta catalogues designed for e-commerce, but we used these for content feeds instead. We built out an individual catalogue for each publication where we were testing to include topics and other information to include more robust reporting.

We tested this idea on our own instead of using an agency, and we saw our costs improve dramatically. We were saving about 15% to 20% per click in comparison to our other campaigns, and we saved our agency fees as well. Because of this success, we expanded this to more than 45 publications using this feed today. The team is also working to automate these feeds, which will save even more time and resources.

Testing in mobile apps

Another area we had not effectively utilised for subscriber engagement was messaging in our mobile apps. We began testing this idea in summer 2022 and started on a smaller scale. The idea was to serve subscribers who opened the app with a message driving them to specific content.

The first campaign was for a concert sweepstakes, and it performed tremendously well. The click-through rate was about 2.5 times what we were seeing in e-mail campaigns. This was also reaching an audience we were not guaranteed to reach by e-mail or social.

After this first test, we have now run four to six campaigns per month. Our average performance continues to be around two times the click-through rate of our e-mails.

With each of these efforts, we continue to look for ways to test and iterate to improve performance and results. Our goal is to make testing part of our culture and mindset, so we are always looking for new ways to improve.

That is the only way we can continue to find new opportunities for reaching customers and getting them the right content at the right time and where they want it.

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