Dustin Pickman wasn’t trying to win back lost readers. He was trying to catch them before they were gone.
As Audience Development Director at Sosland Publishing, Dustin noticed a segment that most publishers either overlook or lump into the wrong bucket: subscribers who had engaged in the past year but had gone quiet for at least three weeks. Not churned. Not re-engageable. Just… drifting.
“It is much easier to keep an audience engaged than to get an audience to re-engage,” Dustin explained in his submission for Omeda’s OX9 Award for Best Audience Retention Program. The goal wasn’t recovery — it was interception.
The Problem With Waiting
Most retention programs are built around the moment of loss. Someone cancels, goes dark, or hits an inactivity threshold — and then the win-back campaign kicks in. It’s reactive by design, and it’s fighting uphill from the start.
Dustin’s team took a different view. The readers who mattered most weren’t the ones who had already disengaged. They were the ones who were about to.
The challenge: how do you reach that audience at scale, across multiple brands, without creating a management burden that falls apart the moment someone’s attention shifts?
The Build: One Journey, Every Brand
The solution Dustin’s team built used Omeda’s content recommendation tool and journey functionality — and the architecture decisions are what make this story worth telling.
Rather than building separate journeys for each Sosland brand, the team housed everything inside a single journey using a cascading qualification method. Each subscriber is routed to the correct brand’s series based on demographic data — meaning someone receives one brand’s content, not several. That was intentional. Audience fatigue was a real risk when working across multiple publications, and the single-journey structure eliminated it by design.
From there, each person enters a three-email series. Every email surfaces trending stories that their peers are reading — pulled dynamically via Omeda’s content recommendation tool, not curated by hand. The final email in the series includes a direct call to action to subscribe to newsletters, which served as a secondary goal alongside the primary one of re-engagement.
One structural detail worth noting: Omeda’s content recommendation tool allows subscribers to re-enter the series after five months, at which point they’ll see an entirely fresh set of trending stories. The program runs continuously without requiring manual resets or content updates. It’s always-on, self-refreshing, and low-overhead — exactly what a team managing multiple B2B brands needs.
The Subject Line Work Behind It
Building the journey was only part of the equation. Getting people to open the emails required a different kind of rigor.
Dustin’s team developed a subject line playbook for their Dairy Processing brand — a detailed audit of what actually drives clicks for B2B processors and what consistently falls flat. The findings were specific and counterintuitive for anyone used to thinking in terms of editorial craft:
Processors open emails to understand risk, opportunity, and scale — not to explore ideas.
High-performing subject lines in their analysis shared five traits:
- Clear signals of scale (dollar figures, capacity changes, portfolio shifts)
- Named entities that carry credibility
- Operational consequence that readers could immediately apply
- Declarative headlines that read like outcomes
- Language with certainty rather than hedging
Subject lines like “Kraft Heinz to split into two separate companies” (2.54% unique clicks) and “Upcoming US dairy expansion investments total $11B” (2.33%) significantly outperformed softer, trend-adjacent lines like “The allure of Italian cheeses” (1.75%). The gap wasn’t subtle, and the team used it to build repeatable formulas: Brand + Strategic Shift, Industry Capital Signal, Future-Facing Trends With a Year Attached.
That level of analytical discipline applied to a re-engagement program — where open rates are already fighting an uphill battle — is what separated this program from a standard drip sequence.
The Results
The engagement numbers reflect the architecture.
The three-email series generated 194,492 unique opens and 3,441 unique clicks across Sosland’s brands. Of those opens, 42% were flagged as bot traffic — a reality the industry is still grappling with, and one Omeda tracks closely. The remaining 58% were real human opens from people who had gone silent for at least three weeks. That’s more than 112,000 readers who drifted and came back.
The secondary goal: 403 form completions resulted in 2,378 new product subscriptions — nearly 6 new subs generated per form filled out.
The more meaningful number may be harder to see. Retention programs don’t produce dramatic recovery stories. What they produce is stability — readers who stay engaged, revenue that doesn’t erode, audiences that don’t require expensive win-back campaigns down the line. This program made that prevention measurable.
What Makes This Replicable
The decisions that made Sosland’s program work aren’t unique to their team or their vertical. The single-journey architecture with cascading brand logic, the content recommendation tool removing manual curation, the five-month re-entry window — these are capabilities available inside Omeda to any publisher managing multiple brands.
What Dustin’s team brought was the judgment to build it right: defining the audience segment precisely, keeping the series short enough to stay useful, and doing the upstream subject line work to make sure the emails were worth opening in the first place.
The result is a retention program that runs without a babysitter and keeps working long after it’s built.
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