How LNP Media Group grew digital subscriptions by 122%, leveraging a Customer Data Platform and unique news media expertise

Introduction

LNP is a daily newspaper headquartered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, reaching 1 million unique users every month and delivering printed news to almost half of Lancaster County households each week. The newspaper is published by the LNP Media Group, a division of the family-owned Steinman Enterprises.

Along with the rest of the news media industry, LNP has been finding innovative ways to fight the steady decline in printed newspaper sales by working harder to understand its readers better and provide a more meaningful customer experience that will lead to improved subscription sales.

The challenge

In 2017, LNP decided to implement a paymeter on the LancasterOnline.com website. The goal was to backfill declining print subscription revenue with an increase in digital subscriptions. At the time, LNP was working with a database marketing agency that didn’t have a strong track record with news media organizations, and the marketing team were struggling to hit their goals. Customer data sat siloed across multiple systems, which made it difficult to achieve a joined-up customer experience and meant that the team spent wasted time manually exporting, analyzing and uploading selections from these multiple systems to their marketing automation platform. At the time, the agency and LNP were using technology from a Customer Data Platform provider that did not stand up to the requirements of a subscription-based business.

Objectives

Having already invested time and money into an agency and technology platform that was not achieving the required results, LNP knew that it needed to find a best-of-breed solution from a vendor with specific media experience. BlueVenn was therefore the standout choice as the only media-specific Customer Data Platform vendor in the US market.

In summary, the objectives were to:

Consolidate data sources from DTI, Second Street (contest data), e-newsletters (Constant Contact), and registered users (paymeter) for cross-channel customer insights and campaign selections.
Ensure full integration between the unified 360-degree database and the email platform.
Reduce time wasted exporting data for analysis and campaigns.
Lean on a vendor that could demonstrate a proven pedigree in the news media industry to provide the relevant expertise for subscription-based marketing.

How did BlueVenn help?

Equipped with the BlueVenn Marketing Hub and Customer Data Platform, LNP now has the tools to leverage its customer data to grow and monetize its subscription database. Using one platform, the team can pull in data sources from across the business into a 360-degree view and quickly analyze, segment and build audiences, without needing to move data between platforms. By utilizing a ‘Do-It-With-Me’ service from BlueVenn, LNP gets access to the technology while knowing that it can lean on BlueVenn’s expertise for any campaign management, analytics, reporting or design services when required.

In summary, BlueVenn helped LNP to:

Create an integrated 360-degree view of the customer and use real-time extensions that connect and automate the flow of data from source systems, quickly and easy.
Save huge amounts of wasted time by integrating the marketing database with its marketing communication channels and remove the need to export and import lists.
Better understand the results of its marketing efforts using BlueVenn’s pre-built reports.
Create better, bespoke email templates to follow up on missed deliveries, offer free samples to lapsed customers and upsell services for weekend deliveries.

Results

By utilizing a 360-degree customer view, cross-channel marketing tools and analytics from the BlueVenn technology, alongside BlueVenn’s unrivalled knowledge, skills and reporting, LNP has seen year-on-year growth in subscriptions:

122% increase in subscription sales from 2016 to 2017
50% increase in subscription sales from 2017 to 2018

Quotes

Sales have had a big jump for us. We’re selling a lot more, for both print subscriptions as well as now digital, since we’ve been able to do things a lot more easily.

BlueVenn has helped to free up our folks’ time!

The long-term impact of working with BlueVenn will be more subscription sales.

It used to take a couple of hours to pull data together but now it’s instantaneous.

For anyone that is considering moving to BlueVenn, I’d say go for it! They have deep experience in the industry and having done that now with a vendor who didn’t have that, we recognize the importance and value of it.