Case Study Highlights
- Increased open-rates 100% (doubled)
- Increased click rates by over 20%
- Resulted in successful changes to group email strategy
The Idea
Beasley Media Group is a group of radio stations across the United States. Our team understands the strategic importance of email and continuously works to improve our first-party data and email strategy. We’ve tried many different tactics over the years but we recently found success by creating taste-based segments aimed at super-serving our audience.
This approach means providing specific content to each member of our database based on their interests. To do this, we needed to collect actionable data. We chose to collect the musical artist preferences of individual audience members. This information allows us to feed our listeners information and opportunities surrounding that specific artist.
The Execution
We created a three-part strategy to collect and utilize this information:
- Ask for permission and interests
- Target emails based on permission and interests
- Build email content for specific audiences based on permission and interests
We began by adding format-specific artist preference survey questions to all of our promotions. These questions are as simple as “Which of these Country artists are among your favorites?” and ask listeners to select their favorites of a list of 40-50 artists.
Our next step was to use this collected information to segment users into different buckets based on their artist-specific interests. We don’t create a separate list for each specific artist but by segmenting with this information we can utilize this information as we need it. These artist-specific segments are a fantastic tool to reach and talk directly to a targeted audience of fans.
When WKXC-FM announced their virtual mini concert series, they utilized their artist-specific email lists to get the word out to the fans of each featured artist. These emails connected with listeners to hear about the mini concerts first and gave them something special with exclusive graphics.
Then, we built our email content to acknowledge those interests by including unique content for the fan. We like to treat our email relationships like real relationships. We make sure to be transparent within the email about why the user is receiving it and contextualize the email within our email list. This strengthens our bond with the listener and shows them we understand them as more than numbers in a database, but as real people we value.
The Results
This new strategy is paying off with a huge boost to our group-wide email response numbers. Across our stations, we now see a phenomenal 100% increase in our open rates! This means our emails now receive double the amount of opens and they did before we enacted this strategy. We also now see a huge increase in bump in our click rates group-wide! That kind of success you can’t ignore, so we’ve adopted audience segmentation as an ongoing tactic we will continue to build across our stations.
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Jennifer Williams is the Vice President of Digital Marketing at Beasley Media Group. She creates interactive marketing strategies that connect businesses to target markets in a highly competitive industry. She also provides deep insight into content and database marketing, consumer analytics, sales lifecycle, and client management.