How Morning Brew Inc. Saved $100K With Iterable's Unified Platform
"We chose Iterable because the user interface is incredibly intuitive, making it accessible for both experienced marketers and new team members. It ensures seamless onboarding across the organization, even for those new to marketing, allowing everyone to efficiently find what they need. The platform's straightforward nature enables team members to engage with it confidently, fostering a collaborative environment where marketing objectives are achieved without unnecessary complexity."
Senior Manager, Audience Operations @Morning Brew Inc.
Dynamic newsletter content tailored to user profile data, such as the vertical of work, drove 15,000 new subscriptions in the first six months, saving over $100k in acquisition costs.
Iterable’s AI tools identified the audiences most likely to engage with event messaging and tailored campaign timing to their behaviors, driving nearly 20% of event registrations while only contacting 10% of Marketing Brew’s audience.
Transforming Business Media With Engaging Content
Since its founding a decade ago, Morning Brew Inc. has evolved from a single daily newsletter into a thriving media brand that reaches millions of readers across multiple platforms.
Starting with a focus on delivering key market updates to business leaders, the company now offers 12 newsletters, podcasts, live events, and social media content. This content spans a variety of business and personal interests, ensuring relevance for its diverse audience.
As one of the fastest-growing media brands in its field, Morning Brew stays true to its mission: providing engaging, timely content wherever its audience wants to interact, from inboxes to social feeds to in-person gatherings.
Erika Olsen, Senior Manager of Audience Operations, has been instrumental in Morning Brew’s growth. She oversees strategies to enhance audience engagement, driving value for readers, advertisers, and event participants alike.
Tackling Operational Silos to Unlock Potential
As Morning Brew diversified its offerings across 12 unique business properties, operational inefficiencies began to emerge. Campaigns were confined within silos, limiting their effectiveness and creating a fragmented view of the audience.
“Before Iterable, our campaigns operated in silos, making it challenging to connect and activate insights across channels,” explained Olsen. This disjointed system required manual updates to sync audience data, delayed campaign automation, and hindered the ability to deliver consistent, personalized experiences across channels, leaving valuable insights underutilized.
For example, data collected from email campaigns couldn’t inform social media targeting, and on-site activations often required custom efforts from the product team, leading to inconsistencies and missed opportunities for integrated campaigns.
These limitations hindered team efficiency, prevented them from scaling their campaign efforts effectively, and made it difficult to truly understand and cater to their audience’s evolving needs.
Morning Brew needed a centralized platform to unify its operations, break down these silos, and build a data-driven strategy that could maximize campaign impact and deliver seamless customer experiences.
How Iterable Sparked Growth: Unified Data Meets Actionable Strategies
To address these challenges and unlock their growth potential, Morning Brew sought a comprehensive solution that could unify their data, automate their marketing efforts, and enable personalized communication at scale—leading them to choose Iterable’s unified platform.
Adopting Iterable enabled Morning Brew to unify its data under one platform, unlocking actionable insights and more targeted campaigns. By integrating custom events and profile fields, the team gained a holistic view of their audience, resulting in more personalized outreach and measurable results.
One powerful example of this success is the cross-promotion of Morning Brew’s professional newsletters. By using subscription and engagement data, the team identified readers who would benefit from other publications in the portfolio.
As Olsen shared, this initiative generated “15,000 new subscriptions in the first six months, saving over $100,000 in acquisition costs.” This cross-promotion strategy is now an essential part of the company’s audience lifecycle flows.
Iterable has also redefined Morning Brew’s approach to event promotion with AI-driven campaigns. A prime illustration of this AI-powered approach was a campaign designed to boost registrations for Marketing Brew’s in-person sports marketing event.
To achieve this, Morning Brew leveraged Iterable’s AI Suite in several key ways:
- Targeted Audience Identification: They first employed a Predictive Goal to pinpoint subscribers within their Marketing Brew audience who exhibited the highest likelihood of registering. This enabled them to create a highly focused segment for their outreach.
- Personalized Customer Journey: Subsequently, they crafted a personalized journey that differentiated between subscribers based in New York (who could attend physically) and those located elsewhere (who might be interested in a livestream option).
- AI-Optimized Communication: Each segment received an AI-optimized promotional email. Send Time Optimization ensured delivery at the most opportune moment for maximum engagement.
- Multi-Touch Engagement: To further encourage sign-ups, the team implemented Embedded Messaging for on-site retargeting. They also sent a follow-up email with an added incentive to those who hadn’t yet registered.
Image Source: Brewing a Strong Data Foundation: The Perfect Blend for Marketing Success
The success of this campaign highlighted the transformative potential of Iterable’s AI:
- Despite contacting only 10% of Marketing Brew’s audience, the campaign drove nearly 20% of initial registrations.
- Using Send Time Optimization to deliver the message at the right time for each user resulted in all emails within this campaign achieving open and click-through rates above industry benchmarks
A Powerful Partnership for Growth
Switching to Iterable’s unified platform has proven to be a game-changer in Morning Brew’s ongoing mission to connect deeply with its expanding audience. By strategically breaking down internal silos and harnessing the power of data-driven personalization, they’ve not only streamlined their operations but also unlocked significant opportunities for growth. This partnership highlights the critical role of a cohesive marketing technology strategy in today’s media landscape, demonstrating how a focus on understanding and engaging individual readers can lead to tangible business impact and establish a new benchmark for audience connection.