In an increasingly cluttered content landscape, where every organization is calling itself a media company, how can you stand out? By creating an emotional connection with your audience.
So how can you do that? Start by welcoming your new readers with a thoughtful welcome email series. This serves as an opportunity to demonstrate your publication’s value and topical expertise, then tell readers what you offer and where they can find it. Besides making your new readers feel welcomed and appreciated, this prepares your readers to engage with you across all of your various content channels.
And once your audience finds the resources they like most, they’re more likely to stay engaged and subscribed for the long haul.
In this case study, we’re spotlighting a company that’s doing it right: Becker’s Healthcare.
Becker’s welcomed and nurtured new readers by sending them a welcome email series within three days of entering their database. To execute their welcome series, they used Omeda’s marketing automation solution to create a month-long series of weekly emails, which introduced recipients to Becker’s suite of educational content, webinars, whitepapers, events and more.
When possible, Becker’s used dynamic content to further personalize these emails to individual interests and preference. This attention to detail paid off, as Becker’s drove 1,000 new contacts to their educational offerings and 26,000 new form submissions in just 4 months.
Here’s how they partnered with Omeda to do it:
Becker’s Healthcare is a Chicago-based media organization that provides forward-looking business news, analysis and guidance for healthcare professionals. Their portfolio includes Becker’s Hospital Review, Becker’s ASC Review, Becker’s Spine Review, Becker’s Clinical Leadership & Infection Control and Becker’s Dental Review.
In addition to its five print and digital publications, Becker’s Healthcare has a wide variety of educational content spanning many channels, from websites, webinars and white papers to live and virtual events, e-newsletter and podcasts.
This presented the Becker’s team with two challenges:
To address both of these challenges, the Becker’s team partnered with Omeda. They created a welcome email series that introduced new readers to their wide variety of content and educational offerings.
The Becker’s team hoped would that this, in turn, would spark:
The Becker’s team used Odyssey, Omeda’s marketing automation tool, to create a month-long voyage of weekly emails.
These emails educated new readers on the organization’s e-newsletters, live and virtual event programs, podcast lines, and lead generation programs (whitepapers and webinars) in hopes of sparking long-term engagement across all channels.
Emails were sent to any reader who had entered the Becker’s database within the past three days and had a valid email address in their profile.
Because users could enter the system through a variety of means (completing an opt-in form, engaging with content, etc.), the welcome series was designed to explain all that Becker’s had to offer in a very general sense.
However, if they had additional behavioral data on a contact, Becker’s used dynamic content to personalize each email’s content to that person’s specific interests.
Through filters they’d previously established in Omeda’s Audience Builder database, the Becker’s team could easily embed dynamic content into the email sequence that tailored sectioned content to the unique interests of each reader, based on their job title/role.
In accordance with their most common and important audience segments, they presented e-newsletter, lead gen, event and podcast offerings that aligned with the following topical areas:
If they didn’t have title information available for a contact, they assigned the user a “default” content tag. Readers with this tag received a more general overview of Becker’s resources, then they were directed to sign-up pages or preference selections for those offerings. From there, they could subscribe for relevant e-newsletters, publications, etc.
They continued sending emails until the reader engaged with a form, either for a webinar/whitepaper or signing up for a live/virtual event.
The Becker’s team then created an Audience Builder query that checked anyone in their Odyssey list for new form submissions. So once a user downloaded a white paper or signed up for a webinar/event, they could be easily removed from the campaign.
Since launching the campaign, the Becker’s team has seen some impressive results. Highlights include:
Best of all: The campaign runs almost entirely on autopilot. The team no longer has to manually pull contacts — or manually create and send new welcome emails — every time they run the campaign.
Want more hands-on help? Reach out to your Client Success Manager or schedule a demo to see about how our end-to-end audience management solution can work for you!
