The 2017 CRM Market Elite Customers: Investopedia

THE CHALLENGE

Since its founding in 1999, financial content website Investopedia has gone through several acquisitions, including sales to Forbes Media, ValueClick, and its current owner, IAC. Through it all, it has managed to become a valuable resource for novice and expert investors alike.

Investopedia was recently faced with the difficult task of switching email technology providers without sacrificing the speed of its marketing efforts. The site had six email newsletters, all of which required manual template editing and content selection, but Investopedia had no visibility into email subscriber interests, no automation capabilities, limited personalization capabilities, and segmentation that was confined to behavioral data. Leadership, marketing, and editorial teams recognized a need to overhaul the email marketing strategy, with an eye on meeting the needs of both modern audiences and data-driven marketers. 

THE SOLUTION

Investopedia identified customer retention platform Sailthru as a partner that could match its pace and deliver significant results as opposed to incremental changes. Sailthru redesigned Investopedia’s entire email marketing program and combined its six email newsletters into a single newsletter based on a tested template with dynamic content population; detailed customer profiles with engagement, behavioral, interest, and predictive data readily available for insights and engagement; and automation that can engage at scale without manual management. Moreover, Investopedia has seen year-over-year increases of 114 percent in page views from email and 81 percent in sessions from email.

Sailthru improved Investopedia’s email newsletter program in a number of ways. For one, Investopedia had stagnant email marketing and engagement performance. Sailthru delivered consistent month-over-month growth in key metrics, such as page views from email and sessions from email.

Investopedia had no visibility into email subscriber interests and segmentation that was limited to behavioral data. Sailthru provided detailed customer profiles with readily available engagement, behavioral, interest, and predictive data.

Investopedia struggled to leverage evergreen content in its email marketing efforts due to a manual process for content selection. Sailthru made it possible to highlight the complete content library, enabling Investopedia to serve evergreen and new content to readers based on their interests.

Investopedia had no automation capabilities; Sailthru brought true automation, with the ability to engage at scale without the need for manual management.

Finally, Investopedia had limited personalization capabilities. With Sailthru, each individual email subscriber receives unique communications based on his personal interests and behaviors.

Janine Silva, director of email and integrated marketing at Investopedia, notes that previously the creation of the newsletters “was done very manually.” Sailthru makes it “much easier to automate that process,” she says, and offers “a great technology that allows us to use tags on our pieces of content and match it to our users and their interests. So someone who’s interested in retirement content will get retirement content versus somebody who is interested in investing content…they’ll get that content, and that’s their interest.” 

The current newsletter “really used the data in somebody’s profile, based on their engagement with our site but also on what they were telling us they were interested in,” she adds. “It took a lot of time and a lot of testing to get that balance right; we did a lot of work on our end to clean up our [content management system] and the way we tag our content. The data science team created an algorithm to figure out what each piece of content on our site is about. It created this really robust tagging system that we then set into Sailthru. Sailthru technology allows us to match a person to the piece of content that suits them. It was really a two-sided project: We had to use our internal resources and technologies as well as Sailthru to deliver the product.”  

REAL RESULTS

• Investopedia condensed its six newsletters into one with dynamic content population.
• It achieved a 114 percent increase in page views from email, year over year.
• It saw an 81 percent increase in sessions from email, year over year.

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