The Challenge: Personalize the way SSP connects Scholarly Kitchen readers with society resources and programming
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is a nonprofit organization formed to promote and advance communication within the scholarly publication community through networking, information dissemination, and facilitation of new developments in the field.
The Scholarly Kitchen, SSP’s flagship publication for the scholarly publishing community, has built an audience of loyal and engaged readers over the years. But without a clear overview of audience and content data, SSP was unable to access to insights about how their readers were responding to various topics, or which specific topics were resonating with their members.
As SSP strategized their marketing approach for the year ahead, Jacklyn Lord, SSP Marketing and Operations manager, saw several opportunities to use Hum for greater personalization to connect SSP’s and TSK communities to the most engaging resources for their interests.
For starters, SSP was reprising a popular seminar on Open Access - a topic they knew would resonate with a segment of TSK readers. They just needed a simple way to unlock their data to reach the right ones.
The Solution: Leverage existing engagement to connect profiles and unlock reader insights
“Today on the Scholarly Kitchen” - SSP’s popular automated daily email - has about 15,000 subscribers, many of whom were engaging regularly with Scholarly Kitchen content.
SSP tapped into reader engagement on TSK as a tool for building connected profiles - or profiles where a user’s email address is connected to their behavioral data, (ie. Affinities, pages viewed, engagement.)
Identifying engagement patterns in this highly engaged subscriber base allowed SSP to go from ~300 connected profiles to 4,000, in two weeks time - a 1233% increase!
This, in turn, gave SSP a clear overview of which topics were most important to various readers. SSP then used Hum’s Audience Explorer to build a segment of all identified TSK subscriber profiles with medium or above engagement with Open Access topics.
“Internally, we know that Open Access is perennially an important topic in our field but we struggled with how to reach Scholarly Kitchen readers who might not be a part of the SSP community,” said Jacklyn Lord. “By creating this highly targeted audience segment, Hum allowed us to reach over 1,700 TSK readers who were not currently receiving SSP communications.”
The Results: Immediate increase in engagement
SSP identified 2,240 Scholarly Kitchen audience members with interest in “Open Access” topics.
When compared to the existing list for webinar marketing, they added an incremental 1,700 people - people who were already in The Scholarly Kitchen’s audience and had an affinity for this topic, but were not included on the original marketing send list.
Using the new engaged audience segment, SSP saw an immediate increase in email engagement for their webinar series:
- Nearly half of the Audience Explorer segment opened marketing emails, compared to a quarter for SSP’s internal list.
- Percentage of the AE segment list that clicked through was triple that of the internal list.
- When compared to ad hoc audiences on social media, audiences based on the AE segment were more engaged on both Twitter and LinkedIn. Clicks on targeted Twitter ads were double that of baseline.
Ultimately, over one third of seminar attendees were identified as being part of the new segment, and 5% of the seminar attendees were reached directly as a result of new prospects identified using Hum data.
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