Productivity improvement with Iterable's Smart Ingest
The Athletic
The Athletic subscription news service delivers powerful sports stories and analyses that bring millions of fans closer to the game. From breaking news and live commentary, to in-depth reads and exclusive interviews produced by more than 400 editorial staff members, subscribers receive meaningful coverage of professional and college teams. Their coverage spans a majority of North American markets, across the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, MLB, MLS, NWSL, PGA, NCAA along with all 20 football clubs in the English Premier League (EPL).
They prioritize delivery of a high-quality product so fans, avid and casual, get unrivaled reporting on their favorite leagues and teams. Subscribers can choose how they engage, consuming news online – through the highly-rated mobile app, their podcast series, The Pulse—a free daily newsletter—and more. Because users are able to customize their unique content preferences, the cross-channel experience must feel personal and dynamic. This way, each individual can have a meaningful connection to The Athletic from their first interaction.
Thrown a Curveball: Outgrew Their Legacy Platform
As The Athletic grew rapidly, they needed to expand their audience, and sharpen the focus on delivering a hyper-personal, cross-channel experience that keeps subscribers happy and satisfied. But, their legacy marketing solution required more manual time and effort to deploy customer communications. It was more challenging to optimize user data to build stronger customer connections, and overall, it couldn’t support cross-channel engagement, including mobile push, in-app messaging, and email.
Subscriber satisfaction, growth, plus overall business success and efficiencies were on the line. “We are focused on personalization. It’s our core approach to marketing and we need to deliver personalization throughout the cross-channel experience and the entire user lifecycle, which our legacy platform couldn’t do,” explained Casey Malone, Director of CRM. Enter: Iterable.
Iterable Helps The Athletic Hit Goals with Scaled, Cross-Channel Connections
As a full-scale, marketing communications platform, Iterable can evolve with changing market dynamics and needs, help staff be more effective with their marketing efforts, and support The Athletic’s current business priorities. Those priorities include:
- Expand the subscriber base through personalized messaging to bring more sports fans unrivaled coverage
- Create brand visibility and awareness through automated cross-channel messaging
- Optimize The Athletic experience through targeted segmentation and testing to deliver the broadest, deepest, engaging sports coverage that retains subscribers
The Athletic now creates engaging marketing campaigns that span multiple user touch points—from email and push to in-app messages. Having a straightforward solution with a user-friendly interface means marketing and certain teams (e.g. CRM, Editorial, Social, Programming, etc.) get time back while gaining more data, insights, and avenues to enhance the creation, delivery, and promotion of top-notch sports reporting for fans.
Robust Segmentation, Unique Targeting Drives Subscriber Engagement and Retention
The Athletic embraced Iterable’s sophisticated segmentation and uses Handlebars in their templates to easily customize and send targeted emails based on user profile and event data. Leveraging these Iterable features, the CRM team creates unique messages and outreach segmented by users’ favorite teams and leagues and tied to key moments, events, or real-time news. There’s no longer a “batch and blast” approach taken with subscriber emails.
By having these capabilities, plus Iterable’s experiment builder—which supports campaign testing—and a unified reporting system which reveals key insights at their fingertips, The Athletic marketing team can successfully produce individualized campaigns for existing and new subscribers.
Timely Communications for Existing Subscribers
When timely email campaigns such as a team or league’s season preview are sent to subscribers, The Athletic can customize the subject line, preheader, imagery, and body copy in Iterable. By optimizing a personal experience for individuals and groups (i.e. an avid MLB fan or casual NHL fans), they have observed through periodic testing a 2x increase in click-through rates, including a +127% lift in subscriber click rate.
A Warm Welcome for New Subscribers
The Athletic has to nail its first message to new customers. That’s the first opportunity to create happy subscribers and increase the user base, leading to consistent growth and success. During registration, when someone chooses their favorite teams and leagues to follow, The Athletic taps into data feeds in Iterable to send personalized “welcome” emails and follow-up communications.
The data feeds inform the personal message, as well as the top five recent stories featured in the welcome note, so the entire email reflects each subscriber’s sports preferences. This makes for better onboarding, a stronger brand connection, and encourages further exploration with the outlet’s vast sports coverage.
The welcome email is the highest performing in The Athletic’s onboarding series—due to the applied personalization—with a 70% higher click-through-rate than the next best performing email. While email is a key avenue to connect with subscribers, personalization must extend to all channels of engagement, including mobile.
Iterable’s Push Notifications Net Positive Attention
An increased digitization of sports means that fans increasingly leverage mobile devices and alerts to track the latest news for their teams and leagues. Mobile alerts must be attention-grabbing, timely, and relevant to each fan, whether they’re at the live event, watching from home, or monitoring on the go.
With responsibility for growth, engagement, and content strategies, the CRM and programming teams were seeking a better, automated way to send mobile push notifications and optimize subscriber engagement through mobile content.
Kenny Dorset, Vice President of Social and Programming at The Athletic explains, “Previously, we were sending more batch and blast push notifications and were unable to personalize based on user engagement patterns and timezone information.” Iterable has given them stronger, automated push capabilities within Studio, and used machine learning to account for the types of stories a subscriber reads most, the teams and leagues they care about, and the time and format that makes them more likely to engage and react to unique content.
Now, subscribers receive more relevant messages and aren’t inundated with communication. Having automated pushes also means a smaller team can increase their work volume to best support the campaigns and messages targeted at The Athletic subscribers.
With sophisticated segmentation features, comprehensive journey capabilities, and an ability to integrate various data feeds in our marketing communications, Iterable allows us to effectively scale our campaigns through automation and personalization, helping us develop stronger, 1:1 connections with subscribers and a seamless cross-channel user experience.
Key Results
Greater marketing efficiencies from improved data collection, analysis, and more automated campaign workflows means The Athletic is activating 10 new user journeys in 2022.
Easy-to-execute campaign testing and creative capabilities support more personal, targeted user communications that increase click-through and conversion rates.
- 2x click-through rates with personalized vs. non-personalized campaigns
- +127% lift in subscriber click rate
- 70% higher click rate between the welcome email and the next best performing email
Stronger campaign performance from deeper user segmentation, communication scheduling tied to key moments, and more data-driven intelligence.
"Iterable has made it extremely easy for us to execute and optimize sophisticated engagement campaigns with minimal engineering support." Read more