Creating a targeted customer retention journey

FT – Renewals & Step Up creative campaign

In a drive to improve renewal sales and reduce the impact of ‘bill shock’ cancellations, the Financial Times tasked us to review and create a new approach to their ‘Renewals and Step Up’ communications.

Got a Million Things on Your Mind?

As one of the world’s most authoritative business voices, FT.com is considered a success story in pioneering a digital subscription model. Managing customer churn rates in order to retain subscribers is fundamental to that success.

 

With an audience drowning in business information, we knew clarity and simplicity would be key to the success of the approach. Tapping into the mindset of the audience we created a bold message approach and memorable visual solution that we applied across the email and DM campaign.

 

The aim, to create standout and showcase the many benefits of FT.com while making the choice to re-subscribe as simple and easy as possible.

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Putting the Customer front and centre

As our insights revealed, Financial Times subscribers are busy people who want to access information quickly. Crucial to the wider design update was the message and copy approach.

 

Our solution was to build upon the existing ‘relationship’ with the subscriber and show that we know and understand the audience needs. This became the focus of our campaign theme and brought a fresh attitude overall by adopting a more familiar language and tone of voice with subscribers.

 

We re-wrote all communications from the ground up, developing an intelligent tone of voice, from enticing subject lines and bold headings, to more friendly body copy and call to actions that call out to be clicked.

A more Memorable, Personable experience

More emotive aspirational language made renewal an easy choice, and using ‘situations’ helped showcase the features and benefits such as ‘stay informed on the move’.

 

With mobile driving over 50% of FT.com’s traffic, a responsive UX centred email design was critical to help build an ongoing relationship with the customer and give a seamless user experience on every device.

We developed a bold and memorable illustrative style to complement the new distinctive approach. The new image shows the busy nature of our audience minds and the surrounding city environment, time and travel challenges. This was supported by a complementary colour palette and new icon style that featured across the communications creating a strong cohesive solution.

 

Awarded DBA Gold for Effectiveness

To ensure the results would be statistically valid, FT.com initially ran an A/B test against the previous email design for two months, targeting 16K+ subscribers.


The results were overwhelmingly in favour of the new design and included:

Very high email open rate 52.1% and unique click rate 8.6%

200% increase in ‘engagement-related’ email clicks

10% increase in page views subscribers who received the new email design

An incredible £26k+ saving in subscription revenue

A 17% reduction in cancellation rates, exceeding all project objectives

A 12% increase in online engagement

An 18% reduction in revenue loss through cancellations

Price previously accounted for 9% of cancellations, results show this reduced to 6.1%