Database and revenue growth are always two of the main goals we see from our partners every year, and promotions are the perfect vehicle to drive both! Kelly Travis, the Director of Marketing and Revenue Operations with St. Louis Magazine, shared exactly how their team saw success in growing and monetizing niche audiences using promotions and took their newsletter strategy to the next level.
Building Audiences to Drive Revenue
Among Second Street partners, 94% of email database growth comes from contests and interactive content. This means promotions give you the opportunity to drive huge revenue through growing top revenue driving audiences.
When planning your audience growth strategy, there are 3 beginning steps:
- Define your audience
Who is your audience? What are the characteristics of your subscribers? What draws them to your organization?
- Determine the job
What are you trying to do with this audience? Are you looking to build specific newsletter lists? Remember, you want to cater to your audience, not just your business or what you want to promote
- Launch fast and improve over time
You don’t need a huge list to get started! Start with what you have, and you can grow and evolve over time. Growth will come as you lean into using promotions!
Case Study: St. Louis Magazine
St. Louis Magazine, or SLM, is a St. Louis based magazine that serves as the local authority on what is so great about the Gateway City. Kelly Travis, the currentDirector of Marketing and Revenue Operation, started with SLM in 2021, and at that time, they only had one daily newsletter.
Kelly knew they needed to start to expand their audience strategy, so SLM began internal discussions about growth. They were able to launch their strategy by:
- Defining their subscriber
- Identifying top categories/tentpoles
- Pinpointing where they had existing content and established reputation
This led them to first focus on the category of Dining. Dining was already one of their tentpole verticals, their current Daily Newsletter already contained dining content they could use, and they had a well-known dining expert on staff.
Growing Categories with Promotions
Kelly and the SLM team came up with the idea of Food Fight Brackets. These were voting brackets they curated that focused on food categories and highlighted local restaurants. They were targeted to draw in an audience in food and dining by leaning into barstool/debate-worthy food topics.
A new food fight bracket was run every few months, and the results they saw were staggering. Within 2023 they had interacted with nearly 4,000 new users and won over nearly 3,000 new subscribers for their dining newsletter.
Determined to give their audience exactly what they were looking for, the SLM team decided to survey their readers. They tied in promotions by offering a sweepstakes prize that anyone who filled out the survey had a chance of winning. They made the prize both valuable and relevant – a reservation and gift card to a popular, local restaurant.
Based on the survey results, the SLM team saw an opportunity to create even more targeted newsletters within the dining category, which meant even more sponsorship inventory to sell. The survey results also provided valuable info for their content and editorial teams to use, making them a huge win for the entire company.
From there, Kelly and team began growing in other categories.
Arts & Culture
SLM curated a quiz promoting the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra collaboration with Natalie Merchant and a sweepstakes to promote upcoming shows at an outdoor theater in St. Louis, The Muny. Both promotions, while also catering to their advertisers, were used to grow their Culture Newsletter audience. They secured over 1,200 opt-ins with these two promotions!
Family
The SLM team targeted the Gateway Arch Park Foundation’s Winterfest festival that is thrown every year. A sweepstakes was used with a prize of tickets to the festival to draw in a family audience. Through this one sweepstakes, SLM gathered nearly 400 opt-ins for their Family audience.
Multiple Audiences
The National Sweepstakes offered by Second Street are the perfect way to grow your audience with minimal lift. SLM utilized the $5,000 National Sweepstakes to grow 3 separate lists! They ran this sweepstakes unsponsored, specifically focused on their internal audience strategy, and they saw 292 opt-ins for their Travel audience, 283 opt-ins for their Dining audience, and 253 for their Family audience.
So is there a promotion type that can grow virtually any audience you need! Yes – ‘Best of’ Ballots! ‘Best of’ Ballots target nearly all businesses within your market and will pull in users with all types of interests. Use this giant engagement to grow the lists you need! The SLM team did just this and pulled in over 2,000 opt-ins for their Family, Travel, and Spirits audiences EACH!
Replicating the Strategy
Since they began using promotions to drive audience growth, the SLM team found that 52% of their subscribers who sign up through promotions stay on their list for at least one year, proving that they are reaching an engaged audience that will deliver immense value for their sponsors. Now, you ask, how can you see the same success? Well we’ve provided the steps and best practices to help take your audience strategy to new heights:
Run Promotions
You know we had to say it! It’s simple, promotions are proven to draw in a valuable and engaged audience. Once you’ve determined the lists you want to grow, focus on running promotions that serve that audience.
List Hygiene
- No pre-checking opt-ins
- Filter out unengaged emails regularly
- Continuously grow lists with promotions
Sales Training
Having a confident sales team is key for your audience strategy. You want to make sure your sales reps are able to confidently communicate the value of your offerings. Train your team and provide resources to help them explain the value of an engaged list over just a huge list size. Don’t apologize for the size of your list – instead own and understand the power of an audience that interacts with you and how that can benefit your advertisers.
As your team becomes more confident, this will actually start to train your advertisers on your value proposition as well! Follow up with the results – how many people opted in to hear from them, how many physical leads you brought them, how many new social followers they now have. They won’t be able to argue with the value and will now see what a truly engaged audience can bring them.
Re-Engagement Campaigns
Use promotions to re-engage your list! Look at those who have not opened or clicked for a period of time and send them a targeted promotion tied to their interests.
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Liz is the Senior Director of Customer Success and has an extensive background in media. She is a huge advocate of the power of promotions for every department within an organization, including sales, marketing, audience development, and editorial.