How Investopedia Used Personalization to Boost Engagement by 114%

When we first met the folks at Investopedia, they faced a series of challenges that may sound all too familiar. The email team was wasting time managing and tweaking different templates, manually curating content for multiple email newsletters. Their website had an outdated structure and inconsistent tagging.

Together, these two things made it hard to manage content. The email team spent so much time attending to detail that they weren’t able to take a step back and take a fresh look at their big-picture strategy. As a result, Investopedia’s email performance was flat.

We’ve seen this malaise before. Fortunately, we’ve also seen the answer: Focus on engagement, across the organization. Revamp tagging, if necessary. Start leveraging your first-party data. Use technology to address each of your subscribers as an individual, and let technology do the grunt work and analysis that can get you there.

That may sound like a tall order, but within a year, Investopedia saw a 114% lift in page views and 81% increase in sessions from email.

How Investopedia Achieved Those Numbers

• Dramatic decrease in the number of newsletters. The editors and producers at Investopedia had been manually assembling six different newsletters. Each newsletter required its own tweaks to the template and its own content selection process. Now, Investopedia uses a single, tested template and dynamic content to populate each newsletter.

• Personalization. Each of the six newsletters was roughly targeted to appeal to a known audience interest. First-party data now powers an extensive library of reader profiles. Those profiles allow every single newsletter to be dynamically populated based on a subscriber’s personal interests and behaviors. Investopedia segments its audience based on interest and engagement levels. The publisher then personalizes using individual interests and sends emails when subscribers are most likely to engage. The result: every single newsletter is exactly tuned to each individual subscribers interests, behaviors, and habits.

• Improved insights. Despite the fact that Investopedia has approximately 27 million monthly unique visitors, it didn’t know much about its subscribers as individuals. Instead, it relied on segmentation. Now, Investopedia’s first party data contributes to comprehensive individual profiles. Investopedia can now access data about engagement, behavior, and interests — even predictive data — necessary to generate powerful customer insights.

By combining their editorial chops with Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s personalization technology, Investopedia has successfully established a virtuous cycle. The publisher sends both fully personalized and editorially curated newsletters. Within personalized sends, the team is able to pin certain content in specific positions, sometimes using Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s Recommendation Manager to do so. But perhaps the best part is that the interest data generated by viewers interacting with this content gets fed back to the editorial team, helping them develop a more effective content strategy.

Click here to learn more about Investopedia’s success story!

Learn more about how Sailthru can help you create personalized web content to keep your customers engaged.