Dennis Publishing is expanding its subscription acquisition programme in 2012 with the Magnetise Group and Ten Thousand Hours (TTH). New titles are being added into the programme, the campaign will be driven deeper into social media and TTH has taken over all media planning and buying for the campaign which is run on Magnetise’s Lead Intelligence platform.
Last year the campaign was awarded Best Media Campaign for 2011 in the New Media Age Awards, having reached a new audience of subscribers, 97% of which were previously unknown to Dennis. What’s more, the campaign was delivered at 52% under target CPA and was forecast to deliver over 12x ROI across 8 publications. Working with Magnetise and licensing its Lead Intelligence management and analytics platform, Dennis was able to reach a completely new audience and deliver impressive subscriber uplift across titles including MacUser, The Week, Men’s Fitness, Auto Express and Digital SLR Photography magazine. In November 2011, the campaign was also awarded Best Use of Data in the PPAs flagship initiative, the Customer Direct Awards 2011. The judges commented it was a “solid and substantial campaign that benefitted not just the subscriptions team but the entire business.”
Following the award wins, the team came together to discuss whether it was possible to improve the already stellar results. As a result, Magnetise and Dennis have further cemented their relationship and identified ideas for technical development as well as new titles for promotion and ways to extend the reach of the campaign itself. TTH has taken over all media planning and buying for the programme having previously achieved superb impact for Dennis managing their affiliate and email marketing programmes. TTH is already an expert user of Lead Intelligence as it has been licensing the platform for some time, as well as a key supplier for the first phase subscription acquisition programme, making them an obvious fit for the brief. This has in turn freed up the Dennis team to focus on maximising optimisation across conversion paths and evolving distributed data collection.
Some of the new features that Magnetise is building into Lead Intelligence include social sign in for networks including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Consumers will be able to sign up to special offers and subscribe to magazines much more easily due to data being pulled into forms automatically on sign-in to the associated service. Similarly, sharing special offers with a consumer’s social graph is being simplified with the addition of Like and +1 buttons.
A further driver of future success will be the new event-based prospect relationship management features Lead Intelligence is rolling out. The original campaign focused on converting via telesales due to its comparatively strong results but when phone calls were not answered, telesales by its very nature could not support conversion. The technology will now provide an option for the telesales team to log an unsuccessful call attempt which triggers an email from Lead Intelligence to the prospect, increasing the likelihood of converting the prospect into a subscriber. Another tactical development for optimising conversion is working with the varied media targets to improve the embedding of forms, in turn reducing the number of microsites associated with the campaigns to streamline the user journey and eliminate unnecessary drop-off.
Richard Ayerst, Online Marketing Manager for Dennis Publishing commented; “Finding ways to improve an already brilliant campaign is a great problem to have. Being able to consult and collaborate with Magnetise and TTH so effectively shows us we’ve chosen the best teams and technologies to work with, and we expect to see our efforts to convert into even more impressive results over the course of 2012.”