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A 17% increase in return web visits.
More than a 16% increase in paying subscribers.
A 7.4% increase in users adding seven or more people to their family tree, a strong indicator of long-term retention.
Findmypast is a subscription platform dedicated to helping individuals uncover the stories of their ancestors and dive into their family history. Through partnerships with renowned institutions like the National Archives, the British Library, and the Family History Federation, Findmypast opens the door to a vast collection of historical records. These records empower users to chart their family trees and uncover connections to everything from royalty to agricultural roots.
Phil Singer, Head of CRM at Findmypast, leads a small but highly effective team managing over 120 automated campaigns across 33 customer journeys. Under his guidance, the focus is on creating communications that delight subscribers, deepen engagement, and avoid overwhelming users. With a passionate audience generating millions of data points each year, Findmypast strives to keep users connected to their ancestry while encouraging renewals with thoughtful, user-first communication strategies.
The process of onboarding users at Findmypast is designed to guide subscribers through the emotionally rewarding journey of discovering their family history, all without inundating them with unnecessary information. However, prior to adopting Iterable, they faced hurdles with their onboarding that impacted its effectiveness. As Phil explained, “the previous approach struggled with poor timing and volume blindness in onboarding communications. For example, people received three onboarding emails in three days that were sent too late to guide real-time behavior. As a result, they either barely engaged with or ignored all of them. We realized email alone couldn’t carry the weight of education, inspiration, and motivation. So we had to rethink our strategy”.
Migrating to Iterable allowed Findmypast to refresh its onboarding strategy by optimizing message volume, frequency, and relevance, and switching from email-only to gaining access to a unified platform for email, in-app, push, and embedded messages. This multi-channel approach ensures thoughtful user nurturing, setting the stage for a rewarding journey into their family’s past.
Using Iterable, Findmypast has created personalized cross-channel journeys that prioritize relevance while avoiding message fatigue. Phil explained, “Everything we do is tagged in Iterable. We can identify the owner, the journey, and use these tags for journey splits. We rely on Channel Optimization in most of our journeys, and we have checks in our onboarding journey to ensure new users don’t receive multiple messages in a short period. This system gives us confidence in how we run every journey.” These precise tagging and scheduling systems keep communications unified and purposeful, even when they span multiple channels.
For Findmypast, a coordinated cross-channel approach is crucial for guiding users into their family story, starting with their onboarding program. This strategy begins with visually engaging emails that introduce the platform and its key features. A day later, push notifications provide gentle reminders, like “Have you started searching?” which prompt users to take action.
This seamless user journey extends to one of Findmypast’s most exciting features: Hints.
Hints act as a personal “research assistant,” automatically sifting through billions of records to find potential matches for individuals in a user’s family tree. These valuable clues can include birth and marriage certificates or even newspaper clippings. Initially, Findmypast sent individual email notifications for each hint, which quickly became overwhelming for some users. To address this, they’ve refined their approach by limiting hint emails to a maximum of four per day—a “sweet spot” found through experimentation that balances strong engagement with realistic expectations.
They’ve also implemented push notifications for hints, opting for shorter messages, as these proved more effective in driving opens and clicks. Additionally, hint boxes are now being created with Embedded Messaging on their website to further encourage logged-in users to stay on the site and engage with their hints. These strategic “nudges” are designed to support the genuinely helpful nature of hints without over-hyping the feature, ultimately ensuring users can effectively utilize them for their genealogical research.
Embedded Messaging allows brands to deliver marketing messages that are natively embedded within other content in the brand’s apps and websites and are delivered to users without interrupting the user experience. This allows them to engage with customers at the right moment with the right message, sparking their next action in the customer journey.
Findmypast’s push notification strategy evolved from branded language to a more effective, data-driven approach. Through extensive experimentation in Iterable, they learned that shorter, vaguer pushes with concise, to-the-point messaging significantly outperformed highly personalized ones, demonstrating that genuine utility supported by the right nudges is key.
Another key CRM challenge for Findmypast is winning back disengaged users, from lapsed subscribers to inactive users. Instead of aggressive, all-or-nothing tactics, Findmypast uses a nuanced approach.
Their strategy includes:
With Iterable’s data-powered capabilities, Findmypast has gained deeper insights into user behavior, enabling the team to boost engagement and retention through strategic decision-making. The results speak volumes. “People who received our onboarding communications were 17% more likely to return to the site after signing up and over 16% more likely to end up with a paid subscription,” Phil shared. He continued, “We also saw a 7.4% increase in users adding seven or more people to their family tree, a strong indicator of retaining the user long-term. These are significant impacts for our business.”
Successful customer communication at Findmypast thrives on collaboration among teams. Phil emphasized, “One aspect I love about working in lifecycle marketing is the collaboration across the entire business—from finance to engineering, product, content, and beyond. Our partnership with Iterable and their support teams has enabled strong cross-team collaboration, particularly with our Data Science team, aligning everyone and supporting our goals.”
This partnership-based approach is especially evident in how the CRM team works alongside Iterable’s Customer Success team. Through regular meetings, this commitment to teamwork ensures they’re continuously optimizing to align with Findmypast’s larger goals.
By pairing collaboration with innovative tools and a user-first mindset, Findmypast continues to enhance its approach to communication, creating meaningful experiences for subscribers and delivering measurable business impact.
Get the Full Story: Tune into the presentation recording where Phil Singer from Findmypast delves deeper into the insights and execution behind their engagement strategy at Iterable’s Activate London.
