Introduction
With 9 million unique visitors per month and around 100 million page views, Mumsnet is the largest online parenting forum in the UK.
Challenge
Mumsnet is a distinctive hybrid of publisher and community platform and its newsletters reflect this unique USP, running the gamut from daily to weekly, user-generated to journalistic, editorial to commercial.
Mumsnet’s Head of Audience and Revenues, Matt Ellis, described to us how all of these different newsletters fit into a holistic strategy. Mumsnet’s daily newsletters are targeted at traffic generation, driving subscribers back to the site and affiliate newsletters leveraging discussions on topic boards such as style and beauty are focused on revenue. Perhaps most interesting is the long-term newsletter series that Mumsnet produce around pregnancy and childcare. For this, the main aim is to provide value within the inbox itself; deepening engagement and brand loyalty.
Newsletters are a central, deeply thought out part of Mumsnet’s strategy. But they were limited by the constraints of traditional ESPs rather than the ambition of their strategy, especially with regard to personalization.
With such a focus on newsletters, Mumsnet understood the significant performance gains they were leaving on the table by not being able to fully personalize their newsletters. Instead, like a lot of publishers, they were having to rely on basic segmentation — a relatively imprecise method of connecting content to subscribers’ interests.
“The payoff of delivering much more relevant content with Echobox is so much better than what we’ve been doing for years and years, which is sending the same thing to the same people over and over again.”
Previously, an editorial team would hand pick a selection of links for inclusion in each newsletter. This had the benefit of bringing to bear the detailed knowledge that the team had of Mumsnet’s content. On the flip side, this meant that the tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers to each of their newsletters would receive the same content regardless of their deeper interests.
Approach
To remedy this situation, Mumsnet switched to Echobox. One of the key ways in which Echobox Email differentiates itself from other traditional — often marketing-focused — ESPs that many within the industry still use, is the granular, per subscriber personalization.
By analyzing behavioral data from each send, Echobox’s algorithms build a detailed picture of each subscriber’s preferences, from when they open their emails, to what kinds of content they like to read. With this information, Echobox can generate bespoke newsletters for each individual subscriber increasing open and click rates.
In Ellis’ words, “we switched to Echobox for the personalization and the ability for it to unlock 500-600 pieces of content rather than just the narrow selection that we previously had. Our leadership team understood that this gave us the opportunity to deliver better, more relevant content to more people, drive more traffic back to the website and get better engagement.”
Ellis’ team at Mumsnet employ a hybrid approach to newsletter production through Echobox, splitting the difference between editorial control and AI-driven optimization. Echobox Email allows Mumsnet to lock in select content of their choosing for every subscriber to see — a particularly useful feature for affiliate links or sponsored articles, for example. With this, Mumsnet’s editorial team are able to ensure that three or four links are included in each newsletter, while the rest are selected by Echobox’s algorithms. “With Echobox, we’re not sending one email out now,” Ellis told us, “we’re sending potentially 115,000 different emails out to people. That’s huge.”
All of this has been underpinned by an excellent working relationship with Echobox’s Customer Success and Engineering teams.
“One of the biggest challenges we had with our old ESP was the relationship with the business itself. They paid no attention to what we were doing. Whenever we had challenges they couldn’t answer the questions we had and when we did submit a ticket a week would go by when we needed the answer last week.”
With Echobox the experience has been completely different: “The accessibility of the team has been a massive bonus for us. The ability to really quickly diagnose errors or mistakes that we might have made is really remarkable. The team at Echobox are super responsive, super accessible. It’s really great.”
Results
Mumsnet’s implementation of Echobox Email has been a resounding success. Both open and click rates have increased through the use of Echobox’s personalization. “The payoff of delivering much more relevant content is so much better than what we’ve been doing for years and years, which is sending the same thing to the same people over and over again.”
“The team at Echobox are super responsive, super accessible. It’s really great.”
Overall, Mumsnet’s newsletters now achieve an open rate 23% higher than before and a 15% higher click rate.
Echobox is helping Mumsnet to not only increase engagement, but deepen it. By allowing Echobox to select the bulk of each newsletter’s content, Mumsnet now spreads referral traffic from its newsletters across a much wider proportion of its website, generating what Ellis calls a “halo effect.”
Conclusion
Moving forward, Ellis’ plans for Mumsnet’s newsletters involve leaning even more on Echobox’s AI-automation. With newsletters being generated automatically, scaling newsletter output is as simple as connecting a content feed. “That’s really interesting for me, because it means that I can create a bunch of thematic weekly newsletters with very little effort,” Ellis told us. “There’s no reason why we couldn’t have 25-30 of these and once you’ve set them up you don’t really have to spend very much time with them. Even if the audience is only 5,000-10,000 people each, that’s still 250,000 more emails that we’ll be sending.”
This shows the value of having a full-suite ESP designed specifically for use cases like yours rather than specifically for marketing workflows, a fact that Ellis acknowledges. “One of the biggest benefits of us working with Echobox in general is that we have a system that’s built for our requirements. There’s nothing in there that we don’t need. There’s nothing in there that we’re not using.”
Would Ellis recommend Echobox to other publishers? “Absolutely. Nobody else offers what Echobox is offering. We spoke to a lot of ESPs and they all talk about personalization, but they don’t really mean it. Echobox does, and it works.”
