Boost Revenue Through Personalized Experiences

If a reader has already seen a story, why would you promote it to them again? When said that way, it makes perfect sense. Yet, many publishers actively do that by including the story in newsletters and promoting it on the homepage or “read this next” section on the site.

Unfortunately, this inhibits revenue growth because users are not as engaged as they should be. Fortunately, we have the technology with our websites to deliver a more dynamic experience that can create a better user experience and grow revenue for publishers.

At its core, a dynamic experience takes into consideration a user’s behaviors and uses that to inform what content they are presented with. This is not a new idea; publishers have been experimenting with personalized experiences for a long time. However, for those publishers that are able to build a deeper profile of their audience and understand how they’re interacting with their sites, dynamic experiences could push revenue growth significantly.

Here’s an example… on Wednesday, I interviewed Nicole McGuire, chief operations officer at Firecrown. One of their sites is Trains.com, which has a number of sub-brands under that, including Model Railroader, Classic Toy Trains, Garden Railways and others. A reader might be interested in only some of the content—model trains vs. Lionel trains as an example. Then there are those that care about the industry, but not model trains.

One of the things they’ve done is start dynamically inserting content into their newsletters based on what the user’s behavior has shown they’re interested in. And the results are strong. “It gets like a 14% click rate, which compared to many of our other newsletters, that’s really strong,” McGuire said on the webinar. In Omeda’s Q4 2024 email engagement report, the average click rate for newsletters on its platform was 3.41%.

And there are a number of reasons this is the case. First, they are more likely to be interested in that content based on their behavior. Second, you know whether they’ve seen that content already. For example, if a reader has read a story about a certain type of model train, what’s the benefit of promoting it to them again?

That’s the problem with static newsletters. If a user comes to your site on a Tuesday afternoon, your Wednesday morning newsletter might show them stories that they’ve already read. And so, the newsletter is just not effective for them. Since people are getting too much email already, that would increase churn. That helps no one.

On the inverse, if you introduce new, contextually desired content to a reader, their likelihood of coming back improves considerably.

This translates into higher retention of current paid subscribers and increases net new subscribers. The reason newsletters are one of the highest drivers of paid subscribers is because they expose more content to the reader and increase the likelihood of hitting the paywall. Ultimately, hitting the wall is one of the biggest drivers of subscriptions.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that improving click rate in the newsletter directly translates to growth in subscription revenue. Showing contextually relevant, unseen content is a straightforward way to grow subscription revenue.

And the important thing to understand is that you can extend this dynamic experience to a multitude of areas on the site. Ever signed up for a newsletter and then the next time you visit the page, you get a pop-up asking you to sign up? How about buying a ticket to an event and then seeing a pop-up or aggressive promotion trying to get you to buy that ticket? Neither of these provides a good user experience to your audience and it also diminishes your ability to promote other things that might either deepen the relationship with the reader and/or generate incremental revenue.

But pulling this off takes time primarily because you need to gather the behavioral data. For example, if a user comes to Trains.com once and reads a single story about model trains, it’s hard to determine whether that person is an enthusiast or a beginner. You need to wait for them to come back repeatedly, giving you the chance to slowly build a profile of the user.

This is why the best time to capture data was yesterday, the second best time is today and the third best time is tomorrow. The sooner you start gathering that data, the sooner you’ll have a profile on that audience.

This requires a customer data platform to pull off. The important thing to understand here is that you need to look at this through two lenses. First, how can you capture the information and what’s being captured. This requires a connection of all your platforms—email, events, commerce, subscriptions, etc.—to a single platform.

And second, it means that you need to actually put that data to use. If it’s a dynamic newsletter, you need to be able to push data in from the CDP that can determine which story should be embedded in the newsletter. Getting all of these systems talking to each other is complicated, but if you can get it right, you’ll be in a much stronger position to power a more dynamic business.

In many respects, this sort of dynamic behavior ties into another theme we’ve written about here on AMO called total monetization. In a nutshell, you want the user’s behavior to help inform how they should be monetized. By understanding what they’re doing, how they’re moving around your site and what they’ve already committed to (did they buy merch or a ticket already?), you can increase the LTV of that reader significantly.

Although there’s something nice about every reader seeing the exact same experience, the best monetized businesses will be those that can cater offers and content to readers on a more 1:1 basis. It takes time, requires resources and a depth of quality content, but it can also be a major driver of growth.