Sosland Publishing grows auto renewal rate by migrating paid newsletters to Omeda
Project Background
Nobody gets into publishing to spend hours stuck in a spreadsheet. But Sosland Publishing found themselves in this spot: They were managing three of their paid newsletters through Excel spreadsheets, in addition to taking payments manually.
Besides creating manual work, this also kept them from generating audience insights and maximizing their subscription revenue.
Sosland had already been a client of Omeda, an end-to-end audience marketing platform with a native CDP, email and marketing platform (also called Odyssey) and a subscription management solution. So to address their workflow challenges, they migrated their paid newsletters over to Omeda as well.
In less than a year, they’ve been able to simplify their email and subscription workflows, create a powerful subscription renewal campaign and set up auto-renewals for their paid subscriptions — without sacrificing a personal connection with their audience.
Learn how they did it below:
About Sosland Publishing
Sosland Publishing is a B2B publishing company with 13 brands and events reaching 470,000 registered readers, primarily focusing on the food industry (publications include Food Business News, Baking and Snack, and Meat and Poultry). They also offer digital and print advertising services, lead generation consulting, industry research and sponsored content placements.
Challenge
Before migrating their paid newsletters to Omeda, Sosland managed their paid newsletters internally using Excel files, which added significant time and complexity to their workflows. Email notifications were sent via Outlook, so the Sosland team couldn’t track their newsletters’ engagement stats or deliverability. This deprived them of key insights that could inform their content strategy or reveal new segments within their audience.
Sosland also managed subscription payments manually before switching to Omeda. This created extra admin work for the team and also increased the risk that a payment would be missed or duplicated. Since they were managing subscription payments manually, Sosland also lacked an auto-renewal mechanism, which cost them valuable subscription revenue.
Workflow complications aside, Sosland also didn’t have a tool for building subscription forms, which made it more difficult for them to promote their publications to new audiences.
The Omeda Solution
Since Sosland was already a client of Omeda, it made setting up email workflows a breeze. Here’s how Sosland streamlined their email workflows and optimized their subscription strategy with Omeda:
Demystified email marketing
Sosland migrated their paid newsletters to Omeda in December 2022. Using Odyssey to send their email renewals, they could track each email’s open and click rates, both overall and for narrower segments of their audience base. From there, they could use open and click data to split the audience, so they could target people who clicked but hadn’t yet renewed their subscription with different messaging.
So rather than talking at their recipients, they could engage them in a conversation based on their specific actions — and set the stage for a positive relationship with each one.
Created an automated, omni-channel subscription renewal campaign
Through Odyssey, Sosland could create a powerful subscriber renewal campaign. They could also customize the wait times between each new message and easily remove disengaged recipients from the voyage to ensure they were not spamming their audience.
This campaign was automated, but the Sosland team could still personalize each message to individual subscribers’ interests and needs. Every subscriber got the message that reminded them, in particular, why they find Sosland’s content so valuable — and why they should resubscribe.
Sosland was also able to incorporate multiple channels in Odyssey, including a pop-up modal, into their renewal campaigns.
Now, Sosland’s audience development team is able to personalize and optimize their renewal efforts based on stats generated from Odyssey, rather than sending notices via Outlook. Best of all, this campaign was almost entirely automated, so the Sosland team could spend more time on content creation and audience engagement.
Implemented auto-renewal
Finally, Sosland used Omeda’s form builder to set up online subscription forms, allowing them to promote new subscriptions to people they hadn’t been able to reach before and offer auto-renewal to new and existing subscribers.
Not only did this help Sosland preserve critical subscription revenue, but it also gave subscribers a convenient way to keep their payment status up to date. So far, Sosland has been able to convert 59% of the Sweetener Report subscribers to auto-renewal since the migration to Omeda. (Pst! This is about the average auto-renewal rate for Omeda clients who use our subscription management solution.)