BNP Media won back 1500+ subscribers with Omeda
Note: BNP Media won the Best Win-Back Campaign award at our 2024 Omeda Idea Exchange conference (learn more about the rest of our award winning campaigns here!). This case study was adapted from their presentation at OX.
Your audience is your revenue. And it’s your best protection against platform changes, advertising shortfalls, and whatever else the media industry throws at you.
Subscribers are a huge piece of that audience base, providing the reliable revenue and data you need to make the authoritative, credible content your audience will remember. So losing those subscribers doesn’t just hurt the books — it makes it harder to keep the rest of your subscribers happy.
TLDR: Churn kills. But with so much focus going toward subscriber acquisition, we don’t hear as much about subscriber reactivation. What’s the blueprint for winning back your subscribers and keeping them engaged long-term? What tactics and tools do you need to win back your subscribers’ business? How can you create a campaign that converts without getting spam complaints and backfiring on your brand?
For answers, we turned to an Omeda client that’s knocking it out of the park: BNP Media. Upon realizing they were churning subscribers, they created an extensive, sophisticated win-back campaign that spanned over five channels (email, on-site, social media, and more) and 18 months.
So far, they’ve reactivated more than 1,500 subscribers and saved $52,000 in subscription revenue, all of which they can reinvest back into their business.
Read on to see how they did it:
About BNP Media
BNP Media is a fourth-generation, family-run B2B media organization with 45+ B2B brands, 40 live events, and hundreds of online events and continuing education courses. They also offer magazines, websites, events, custom media, webinars, continuing education coursework, and market research insights covering several industries, including architecture, engineering, construction, food and beverage and manufacturing.
Problem
BNP Media noticed that they were churning subscribers to their three paid titles, which cost them vital recurring revenue and deprived them of loyal audience members.
BNP knew that to win these lost subscribers back, they needed to remind readers of their value, catch their attention and earn their trust. So they couldn’t just send a one-off marketing email and hope for the best. They needed to serve those lost subscribers personalized content and offers across multiple channels.
But re-engagement campaigns are risky business: Presumably, lapsed subscribers lapsed for a reason. Spam them with irrelevant offers and they’ll leave for good (and maybe hit spam on the way out). So BNP needed the right tactics and technology to help them scale their campaign, while also giving each individual the content and offers they needed to reconvert.
Solution
BNP Media was already managing its first-party data, email and subscription payments through Omeda. So they turned to Omeda to build, perfect and execute their win-back campaign. Here’s how it looked:
1. BNP Media used Omeda’s CDP to identify paid subscribers that had churned in the past six to 24 months. Since Omeda pulls in audience data from every channel, BNP could see how each lapsed subscriber had interacted with them on not just their website, but email, social media and other channels.
This helped BNP see why subscribers might have churned, pinpoint its messaging and choose the content that would resonate with their former subscribers. These data points gave BNP the blueprint they needed to perfect their offer.
2. BNP Media used Omeda’s email and marketing solution to create an automated win-back campaign that covered email, direct email, telemarketing, on-site personalizations and social media display ads.
Messages included discounted subscription offers that increased the longer someone had been away from the publication (ranging from 10% to 30%).
Someone who churned six months earlier would receive an initial email, personalization, display ad, direct mail piece and telemarketing offer. If they didn’t resubscribe, they’d receive another round of communications the following month, with a slightly increased discount offer. After 30 days, recipients that hadn’t resubscribed would receive another round of communications across all five channels — and an even higher discount offer.
After the eight-month mark, the BNP team waited 120 days to send another round of offers. From there, they sent two more rounds of even higher discounts, one at the 18-month mark and a final offer at the 24-month mark. Spacing out appeals over three to four months gave recipients time to rediscover BNP on their own schedule without writing them off completely.
3. Throughout the campaign, the BNP team could use Omeda’s campaign planning tools to filter out recipients that had already re-engaged or temporarily pause sending to recipients displaying email fatigue. They could also use Omeda’s built-in deliverability monitoring to ensure that their emails were still reaching recipients’ primary inboxes. This way, BNP could send multiple messages to thousands of recipients without fear of hurting their sending reputation (or more importantly, annoying their audience).
Results
So far, this campaign helped BNP Media reactivate more than 1,500 lapsed paid subscribers across their three paid titles, resulting in over $52,000 in win-back revenue, all of which they’ve been able to put back into their business.