Publishers often chase growth by adding to their overall count of new readers or visitors. But reactivating lapsed users can be even more viable.
The local news publisher Daily Voice has been focused on growth since it was acquired by media holding company Cantata Media in 2018. Since then, the Voice’s network of community news outlets in the northeast has grown to about 4 million monthly site visitors and 750,000 newsletter subscribers.
Though, according to CEO Travis Hardman, the company classifies about 15,000 subscribers as dormant every month due to typical newsletter churn. After years of churn, Daily Voice had more than one million emails on its dormant subscriber list.
Daily Voice turned to its longtime email monetization partner, LiveIntent, for help identifying which dormant subscribers were likely to respond to reactivation efforts.
And dormant doesn’t necessarily mean permanently disengaged. As it turns out, the users Daily Voice has reactivated so far this year are more engaged and attract higher CPMs for their impressions than its wider subscriber base.
The dormant dilemma
Daily Voice is almost completely ad-supported by open web programmatic, with display ad placements on its websites and in its newsletters.
Like most ad-supported publishers, Daily Voice has seen CPMs drop over the past year, as advertisers pulled back because of their cautious economic outlook. However, the company doesn’t see this downturn as an existential threat, according to Hardman, because Daily Voice’s main source of revenue growth is audience growth.
Reactivating dormant users has become another audience development channel to yield incremental revenue, Hardman said, though it might seem like an uphill battle. After all, why would someone who hasn’t opened emails for months or years suddenly return to the newsletter?
But, since January, Daily Voice has reactivated about 350,000 lapsed subscribers.
It’s important to note that dormant users haven’t opted out of receiving emails; they simply stopped opening them. People sign up for newsletters and then forget about them all the time. Emails get buried in inboxes or caught up in spam filters. Sometimes technical errors can result in an email service provider (ESP) bouncing messages or failing to deliver them.
Publishers have to cull their email lists regularly to avoid getting flagged by their ESPs for sending messages to disinterested users. So, if emails are consistently unopened, the publisher adds that subscriber to the dormant list.
But that person isn’t necessarily disinterested in the publication, Hardman said. Case in point: Reactivated users were about half as likely to unsubscribe from emails compared to Daily Voice’s benchmarks.
Audience (re)development
Daily Voice has been using LiveIntent to serve ads in its newsletters since 2014, so LiveIntent has years of insight into user behavior across Daily Voice’s network. LiveIntent’s reactivation product combines those insights, as well as data modeled from the publisher’s reactivation attempts, to generate lists of dormant subscribers that could become active again, given prompting.
For example, LiveIntent’s algorithm is able to see how recently a cookie fired on a publisher’s site for an impression associated with a given dormant email address. That cookie could be an indicator that the user is still active on the site, even if the user isn’t opening emails sent by the publisher. If the algorithm flags that user as a candidate for reactivation, the publisher gets a recommendation to target the user with reactivation emails. If the user starts engaging with the publisher’s emails again, the algorithm is trained to recognize cookie recency as an indicator of reactivation potential for other users as well.
LiveIntent does not use identifiable data from one publisher to benefit another or aggregate reactivation data across publishers, according to its CEO Matt Keiser.
To reactivate prospects identified by LiveIntent’s solution, Daily Voice didn’t rely on paid media or promotions. It sent them emails that read along the lines of, “We saw that you haven’t been reading our emails, but we want to give you another chance to read the local news,” Hardman said.
LiveIntent has been providing Daily Voice with lists of 10,000 to 20,000 candidates for reactivation every week, starting with the most likely prospects, Hardman said.
The first 100,000 or so users flagged for reactivation have outperformed the publisher’s benchmarks. They are 1.65 times more likely to open emails, with more than twice the average click-through rate. As a result, the eCPM for these audiences is 400% higher than the publisher’s average email marketing CPM.
Reengaged subscribers offer higher lifetime value, too, because their higher click-through rate means they’re bringing more impressions to Daily Voice’s websites, on top of the higher CPMs, Hardman said.
Based on these results, Daily Voice plans to revisit its dormant list every quarter going forward.
“For anyone who has a big dormant list, [reactivation] is an opportunity akin to spending a bunch of money to acquire new subscribers,” Hardman said, “except it’s less expensive, more effective, and these people already know your brand.”
