In this article, I hope to give you a sense of the challenges and successes we have experienced launching a start-up data-driven transactional business within a media organisation.
As a special interest publisher with a strong subscription base and growing digital revenues, Immediate has been building new models to drive consumer revenues. A key one has been around data and transactions.
Pre-internet, print used to be the go-to destination for specialist content, where audiences could engage with their passions through each issue of their favourite magazine. Whether the passion was for gardening, food or football, a hallmark of the experience was the deep engagement readers felt for magazine brands.
That deep engagement still exists, but sits within a much richer landscape, with much greater frequency of contact. Our brands now create and define communities, with deep engagement across a number of branded touchpoints – from the website to the magazine, the app to the event. Excitingly, these touchpoints provide a rich environment to gather data across scale audiences.
Looking at Immediate’s business, we reach over 33 million uniques a month, we sell more than 74 million magazines a year and we have over 1.1 million active magazine subscribers. We reach super engaged communities united by their passions. And we have scale; for example, we reach an affluent community of over six million cyclists each month, 83% of whom consider themselves influencers.
Our communities and the trust they have in our brands give us permission to market other products and services to them. And driving this endeavour is an increasingly powerful single view customer database at the heart of our business, unlocking insight into who our customers are and what they will buy from us.
Building a transactional business
When we began to build our transactional business, we were conscious of a strong heritage in data, having built a database of around 1.1 million subscribers to our magazines. This allowed us to build profiles of our audience and to run innovation workshops to build product propositions that were tailored to meet the needs of our focused audiences.
Our portfolio of specialist brands is rich in a demographic that we have dubbed Generation Wealth. Most of the country’s wealth is concentrated around the over-45s. They dominate wealth, income and consumer spending in the UK. Over 45s account for 80% of assets, 70% of disposable income and 60% of consumer expenditure. This makes them a highly lucrative market to target for direct-to-consumer sales, as well as advertising. They have time and money and they like to spend it in pursuit of their passions!
Knowing this audience well, we identified a number of needs around niche differentiated travel experiences linked to interests and passions, adventurous enough to impress the neighbours but delivered by a provider who took care of all the little details to offer comfort and safety in even the farthest flung destinations.
We also saw a need for differentiated financial services, built around the retirement needs, investment planning and specialised insurance requirements that this older audience has. Our understanding of our audience combined with the trust, reach and engagement of our brands made a powerful combination to launch a financial services marketing vehicle from a standing start.
Marketing a wide range of products
Our audiences and reach gave us a very rich prospect pool for building a direct-to-consumer business. Taking a ‘test and learn’ approach, we have trialled a wide variety of products and, since launch, we have built up a sizeable range of travel and financial services products.
Our travel product range includes cruises, rail tours and hotels. Popular destinations include old favourites like Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast, Lisbon, Canada and the US. But other more exotic locations like the Arctic Circle are gaining traction.
We’re working with selected partners to offer a range of products from cruises to holiday cottages. We’ve marketed our holidays through contextual placements online, as well as print pages and have an online booking engine where we can track sales end-to-end.
Importantly, we work with partners to get a lifetime value revenue share and we use the customer data acquired for insight and targeting purposes.
Details on what people buy, when they buy and repeat purchase behaviours provide rich insight. For example, we know that 11% of travel purchasers repeat book on average, rising to 40% for some holidays. We also know that second bookings tend to be higher value and we are building up patterns of when and how bookings peak.
Our email programme is much more targeted as our pool of purchasers has grown. We have built up a sizeable qualified list of travel bookers, travel email opens, and link clicks.
On the back of this love of travel, we launched our first financial services products, helping our audiences fund their leisure activities through, for example, getting the best deal on buying an annuity, taking out an equity release product, buying better value currency and planning for the best return on their savings.
Over time, we are building up a profile of our consumers’ behaviour, which will allow us to further refine our marketing.
We’ve learned a lot about developing a strong editorial proposition and creating a context for selling these products. We’ve begun to build integrated online and offline campaigns and are building a prospect list which to date has seen very good open and click through rates to our Money newsletter.
We’re also learning about which placements are driving most return and what the customer maturity cycle is. This is hugely valuable data which is feeding into our single customer view.
Data is at the heart of our business
Our platforms and brands allow us to capture a large amount of data. We know our consumers well and are able to look at them through the lens of individuals or anonymous groups.
Working with our partners, CACI and Krux, together with our own development resource, we have created the plumbing that allows us to monetise data in a number of ways.
Honing in on known individuals allows us to look at characteristics in terms of purchasing history, socio-demographic insight and engagement metrics. This creates segments of known individuals for marketing campaigns or insight analysis.
Targeting these known individuals, we can tailor marketing around interest areas, purchasing behaviours, demographics and other variables. Our partner CACI has built us a single view customer database which gives us insight and targeting tools. For example, we use Fast Stats which is easy and simple for analysis projects, but we can also get SQL files for more in-depth queries and analysis. These include understanding complex repeat purchase behaviours across multiple products (eg travel booking patterns), the typical customer journey between enquiry and booking for financial products and also to append additional third party variables such as insurance renewal dates, financial characteristics at postcode level.
Targeting anonymous users, through behavioural targeting via our data management platform, Krux, gives us tagging and segmentation tools to target advertising based on known behaviours. For example, we can segment a travel audience not only from their behavior on our travel site but from the programs they’re researching on Radiotimes.com. We can easily and efficiently build a proposition that allows us to target the audience more tightly, rather than being solely dependent on the context of our sites.
We take data from many different sources: subscriptions, events, forums, holidays and products, tablet sales, event attendees, web registrants, forum users, social, competition entrants, holiday purchasers, product buyers, among others. This data feeds into our single view customer database which is plumbed into our email marketing tool allowing us to set up trigger-based marketing campaigns as well as individually planned email sends.
Creating this infrastructure required us to invest in the skillset and individuals that are needed to drive it. It takes time and money to get these things embedded in the business but is a sound investment in my opinion.
What we have learned
* It takes time to build the right kind of data.
* It takes time to build a specialist skillset.
* It takes time to develop a compelling suite of offers and effective marketing campaigns and to learn how customers respond.
But the results are well worth it.
