Bonnier

Major publisher increases content relevancy and doubles open and click rates for its newsletters using Silverpop Engage

The Company
Bonnier Corporation is one of the largest consumer-publishing groups in America, and with more than 50 special-interest magazines and related multimedia projects and events, it’s the leading media company serving passionate, highly engaged audiences. With over 1,000 employees and more than $350 million in annual revenue, Bonnier ranks in the top 10 nationally among publishing companies.

The Challenge
Bonnier has been using Silverpop Engage for several years across all of its properties, including such popular titles as Yachting, Field & Stream, Caribbean Travel & Life and Saveur. Although already popular with its strong readership base, Bonnier saw an opportunity to grow Parenting.com and further engage with its readers according to their stage of parenthood. At the time, Parenting.com offered limited newsletters to its readership.

“We knew who our typical Parenting.com readers were,” said Heather Vessey, email marketing, senior manager, Bonnier. “Since we understood our readers’ interests as well as where they were in their particular life stages, we saw an opportunity to expand our newsletter readership by increasing our level of relevancy to those target audiences.” 

The Solution
Bonnier embarked upon an aggressive redesign of Parenting.com’s email newsletter program with the goal of providing relevant content that guided female readers through more than three years of parenthood, from contemplating pregnancy to their child’s toddler years. Today Parenting.com has revamped and launched several life stage newsletters targeted toward the following audience categories: 

• Pre-conception: Readers can sign up for the “Trying to Conceive” newsletter, a 24-week course for women who want to get pregnant. The timely content Bonnier provides includes a Fertility Calculator and articles on managing stress.
• Pregnancy: Readers then sign up for “Daily Pregnancy Planner,” a 180-day pregnancy newsletter with insider information on everything you need to know about being pregnant, including a week-by-week picture of how your baby is developing and tips for dealing with pregnancy symptoms. To drive more traffic to Parenting.com from its “Daily Pregnancy Planner,” Bonnier uses the content scrape functionality in Silverpop Engage to easily incorporate relevant Web copy into the newsletter.
• Parenthood: Based upon due date, Parenting.com will automatically send new mothers the “Ages & Stages” newsletter, which provides the latest info on today's most pressing parenting issues organized by age—from newborn to toddler. Relevant content includes advice on the best baby gear to buy and info on what milestones your baby should be reaching.

Since several departments contribute to the newsletters, Bonnier uses scalable email templates to handle the sheer volume of content, with varying levels of access required according to one’s role within the organization. “One of the things we most like about Engage is its ease of use,” Vessey said. “We can customize it to our particular needs for each of our 50 different properties. The flexibility of Silverpop Engage was critical to the success of this redesign and the ability to make our newsletters an integral part of Bonnier’s growth strategy to drive more traffic to the Parenting.com site.”

The Results
Using Silverpop Engage, Parenting.com is able to deeply engage its readers from pre-conception to birth and beyond through timely, relevant life stage newsletters. “Parenting.com’s program has shown how truly engaged recipients can be when content is targeted specifically to their needs,” Vessey said. “Open rates for Parenting.com’s newsletters are typically double the average open and click rates of other Bonnier properties. In fact, the “Daily Pregnancy Planner” has experienced consistent double-digit list growth since it was launched in March of 2009.”

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Download the PDF to learn how Bonnier used content relevancy in its life stage newsletters to increase customer engagement and traffic to its Parenting.com Web site.